I’m seeing the “plex media server was unable to open its media database” error when starting plex media server – but only when I don’t run it as an administrator. When I run as administrator, everything works perfectly.
What permissions do the files need to have? Maybe this is a dumb question but, what account does plex use to access and write the db? If I know the user account name, I can probably get the permissions setup properly on my own. Or does it use my own account? It’s clearly a permissions issue, so what do I need to understand to fix the permissions on the files?
The problem is: once you have started Plex server “As Administrator”, the access permissions of some files within its Plex data folder are set to the Administrator user.
Which makes it impossible to either change, delete or even simply read them by other Windows user accounts.
Never run Plex Server as Administrator. There is no need to do so.
To repair the damage, you need to:
shut down plex server
reset the “ownership” and file access permissions of every file, folder, subfolder back to defaults.
In the end, the Windows user account under which Plex server is regularly started must have full read/write access.
Thank you, I solved it by recursively setting myself as the owner on all files in a parent folder, and then also recursively ensuring that permissions gave me read and write control (“full control”) on the files. Before I did that, I noticed that my account somehow lost the ability to write some of the files in the Plex Media Server directory.
Now Plex runs perfectly without running as Administrator.
