Mounting External Drives - Ubuntu 14.04 and Chromebook

Gordon Tillman

OK, this post is part of my continuing experiments with an ASUS C200 Chromebook. I have installed Ubuntu 14.04 using crouton.

I had created two partitions on a Micro SD Card, one as Fat32 (EsFat actually) and the other as ext4.

The FAT32 partition mounts at /media/removeable/share and the ext4 partition mounts at /media/removeable/gordy. I tried storing various projects on the ext4 partition but when I tried to build from that partition I would get a permissions error.

Long story short, it turns out that the the ChromeOS side is mounting the ext4 partition with noexec permissions. That was causing all the problems. The solution turned out to be simple. Just a single command to remount the partition (issued from the Ubuntu side) does the trick:

sudo mount -t ext4 -o remount,rw /dev/mmcblk1p1 /var/host/media/removable/gordy

So, in the above command:

  • -t ext4 is the type of the partition. I had previously formatted it as ext4.
  • -o remount,rw tells the system to remote the partition with read/write privileges
  • /dev/mmcblk1p1 is the path to the partition that needs to be mounted. It will likely be different on your machine. You can find out what your device path is by just typing mount with no arguments and grepping for the name of the volume.
  • /var/host/media/removable/gordy is the mount point. A careful reader will notice that this is different than what I wrote at the top of the post (/media/removeable/gordy). Well as it turns out /media/removeable is a symbolic link to /var/host/media/removeable and if you try to mount to /media/removeable/gordy the mount command complains about trying to follow too many symbolic links. Please note that this mount path will also be different on you machine, unless you named your partition “gordy” as well. :-)

Anyway, after remounting I am able to use my ext4 partition to hold projects and be able to ./configure and make out of directories on the partition just fine.