OS can see external disk, Plex cannot. Ubuntu

[Le_Ben]

I have an old PC running Ubuntu 18.04 and Plex Server - all good.

There is an internal drive with some media on that and Plex can read folders and use that fine.

I have a 3Tb USB drive with media on it, but Plex can’t read the folders.

It can navigate to the drive, but can’t see any folders on it. I have chmod’ed and chown’d to the account ‘plex’, but still nothing - even with 777. I have reformatted to ext4, created new folders (setting permissions and ownership), and nothing.

So I got another external USB drive, formatted (ext4 again) and tried the above and still no folder access under Plex.

The Ubuntu O/S can read it without problems - so SURELY this has to be a permissions issue of the ‘plex’ user account, but being the owner and permissions set to 777 what else can I try?

Edited to add: As I’m typing this, the only thing I can think of is whether Plex is not running under the account ‘Plex’, but under another account - how could I check this?

Thanks
Ben

[ChuckPa]

Using EXT, NTFS, or other format drives (internal or external) on Linux

This document is of primary interest to anyone who has connected USB drives or has media on other internal drives but user plex can’t access it due to Linux’s default security mechanisms. WARNING: This procedure will not work for SNAP, Docker or other container mechanisms unless expressly handled within the confines of the container. This procedure is intended for use with the dpkg package. We will walk through the steps needed to add these external USB hard drives and internal hard drives…

[Le_Ben]

Thank you Chuck.

There are a few items there that should help me. I’ll try when I get home tonight.

[Le_Ben]

Thank you again - this worked perfectly.

The only bit I needed (hadn’t done) was

su
find /disks/media3 -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

[ChuckPa]

Glad I could help

[dreamwc]

Are there any easier instructions? Look I just want to play my movies all through my home, I didn’t expect to have to have a Physics degree just to use the dang software to show movies…

Parrot Security 4.5.x (Debian)
Dell 64bit System

I have run this with windows and had no issues at all…so can someone tell me an easy fix so PLEX will see what is on the inside of my external HD or is there a bash script anyone has written to fix this? Because I don’t feel like screwing up the very OS I just spent a week installing and tweaking. PLEASE…

[ChuckPa]

Easier?

I gave the step-by-step How To.

This is part of what it means to run Plex on Linux.

Sorry.

If Windows is easier, what does that tell you?