Using second drive (ext4) in Linux--tried the tip

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
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I followed these instructions to get my second drive to serve files (Ubuntu 18). When I go to add folder to a library, in the file selector nothing appears under /hdd and manually entering /hdd/Videos does not give me movies in that library.

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df shows/dev/sdb1... /hdd

fstab has UUID=2d875975-15c9-4fe0-99d7-7ccf9ef64fa8 /hdd.

Running ls -l at /hdd shows drwxr-xr-x 5 plex plex 4096 Jun 3 09:03 Videos.

What am I doing wrong?

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My solution was to

  1. change the username in /etc/default/plexmediaserver [edit: this did nothing, see below]
  2. re-mount (with bind) the Videos folder by itself to a new root folder and
  3. set permissions as in Chuck’s instructions.

(Following the tip by itself did not work.)

I added the following to /etc/fstab

/hdd/Videos /VideoMount none defaults,bind 0 0

This finally allowed me to add libraries at /VideoMount/Movies and /VideoMount/TVShows.

(Strangely, for that last one, TV Shows with a space no longer worked as it did on my earlier machine; I had to eliminate the space.)

I have no idea why this incantation worked and others did not.

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As a note to all reading here:

/etc/default/plexmediaserver is for SYSV Init systems only (Ubuntu 14 / Debian 7)
A proper override file must be used for Ubuntu 16+ and Debian 8+ which use systemd

Quotes and \ do work in /etc/fstab when done correctly. It’s tricky so practice before rebooting the system.

1 Like
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  1. You are right. sudo ps -u plex shows that user plex is still running all plex processes.

  2. I did not use any quotes, \, or name-internal spaces in /etc/fstab. Rather, I was trying using the Plex web GUI to set /VideoMount/TV Shows as a library location, and this failed until I renamed the directory to remove the space.

I am guessing that my key fix was to give my videos a mount point dedicated to them by re-mounting (with bind) my /hdd/Videos directory at VideoMount.

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Why can’t you just use the exact mount point /hdd/Videos you’ve defined?
PMS will let you drill into /hdd (presuming you set 755 permissions on /hdd AFTER being mounted the first time.

Remember: Set the permission of the mount point AND set the permission of the mounted root dir . (Often overlooked)

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Why can’t you just use the exact mount point /hdd/Videos you’ve defined?
I tried that, but never was able to drilldown in the GUI.

…set the permission of the mounted root … 755 permissions on /hdd

I did not do that as I did not want to alter the permissions of all the other non-media files on /hdd (/dev/sdb1).

I did however set permission for the /hdd/Videos directory, using your two find... chmod commands. But I see that that was not enough.

Set the permission of the mount point

How does “Set the permission of the mount point” differ from “set the permission of the mounted root dir”? I have mounted /dev/sdb1 at the mount point /hdd – isn’t that the same as the “mounted root dir”?

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