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I am no longer able to access external drives on my computer (running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS). It was working fine a few weeks ago, so I'm not sure what changed.

I get this error message when trying to open the drive in Nautilus, for both USB drives and my extra hard drive:

Unable to access "8.1 GB Volume"
Not authorized to perform action

When I run Nautilus as root, it doesn't even show the drives. I was able to run sudo gnome-disks and interact with the drives that way. If I just run gnome-disks, then I don't have permissions and get the same error message.

I don't have this issue on another Ubuntu 18.04 LTS machine with the same USB drive. Nautilus without root works fine. So I don't think the issue is with the drives but rather is with the computer.

catanasian
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4 Answers4

5

I finally figured it out. My user account was part of the chrome-remote-desktop group. Once I removed it from that group and restarted my computer, auto-mounting and accessing the drives works as expected.

I had added my user to the chrome-remote-desktop following this post: https://superuser.com/a/850359/588342. After doing so, chrome-remote-desktop auto-runs on startup. Instead of that, I just added a command to run it in "Startup Applications Preferences": /opt/google/chrome-remote-desktop/chrome-remote-desktop --start

catanasian
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Use command:

sudo chown yourusername:yourusername /media/yourusername/path_to_mounted_volume

In nautilus user mode the volumes are mounted in /media/yourusername/

Replace yourusername with your user name and path_to_mounted_volume with path from command: 

ls -l /media/yourusername/
kukulo
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I have tried it but still can't work. The workaround is keep username in chrome-remote-desktop. Remove chrome-remote-desktop service from systemctl.

sudo systemctl disable chrome-remote-desktop

Then add command /opt/google/chrome-remote-desktop/chrome-remote-desktop --start to "Startup Applications Preferences" via the GUI.

Tejas Lotlikar
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skylence
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Today I had the same issue with my external 500gb hdd, I did next, it helped me:

sudo apt remove chrome-remote-desktop
Volodymyr Oliinyk
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