CrunchBang Linux

gordintoronto

New Member

Registered: 2010-04-09

Posts: 3

LiveCD access to hard drive

With every other LiveCD I have tried, I had full access to the hard drive. Not so with the Crunchbang Alpha, it said I needed authentication.

Thanks to rayslinux.blogspot I found this:

sudo gedit /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.devicekit.disks.policy

Find the id:
org.freedesktop.devicekit.disks.filesystem-mount-system-internal

Look for the line:
'allow_active'auth_admin_keep'/allow_active'
and replace it with:
'allow_active'yes'/allow_active'
Sorry the < character is being interpreted by blogger so it has been changed to '

And save!

And I immediately had full access to the hard drive. In VLC, each partition showed up, in Terminal I found my Home partition under Media and a long name I had to copy/paste into a CD command.

I would like to suggest that having the .policy file that way to begin with would be more user-friendly.

jnb

#! Member

Registered: 2009-01-12

Posts: 71

Re: LiveCD access to hard drive

i was going to post this too. last night i tried to access my hd from the live cd to fix a few problems and was very confused.

skinnypup

New Member

Registered: 2010-04-05

Posts: 4

Re: LiveCD access to hard drive

I typically use mount to mount my partitions.Its handy and not much to learn to use.
cd /mnt <place to mount drives>
mkdir hda1 <makes a dir to mount the 1st hd partition on>
sudo mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1 <this makes the root of the 1st partition appear mounted in /mnt/hda1>
cd hda1 <go into the mounted drive now>
ls <should show contents of hda1>

if confused about what a partition should be called open gparted and look at the names. hda1 sdb1 etc ...

symlinks are handy things too
sudo ln -s /mnt/hda1 /home/yourusername/newfolder <this will create a symlink in your home folder called newfolder<call it whatever you want> that shows the contents of the 1st hd partition in this example.
Have fun bangin#!

Last edited by skinnypup (2010-04-10 05:53:34)

gordintoronto

New Member

Registered: 2010-04-09

Posts: 3

Re: LiveCD access to hard drive

Thanks for the explanation.

However, this is typical of the things which stop Linux from becoming popular with the masses. There isn't 1 person in 100 who wants to learn this ugly series of commands.

Also, the mkdir needs "sudo" in front of it.

Last edited by gordintoronto (2010-04-10 15:19:10)

Zwopper

The GIMP Pimp

From: Deep in The Swedish Woods

Registered: 2008-11-28

Posts: 580

Website

Re: LiveCD access to hard drive

Thanks for the explanation.

However, this is typical of the things which stop Linux from becoming popular with the masses. There isn't 1 person in 100 who wants to learn this ugly series of commands.

Also, the mkdir needs "sudo" in front of it.

Yes there is! and anyway who cares if they don't want to, it's THEIR loss not ours!

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Toolz

#! Die Hard

From: Asia

Registered: 2009-02-02

Posts: 937

Re: LiveCD access to hard drive

Yes there is! and anyway who cares if they don't want to, it's THEIR loss not ours!

You used there and their in the same sentence on a Linux site without any errors. That's bad form. Considering your Swedish I'll let you off.

gordintoronto

New Member

Registered: 2010-04-09

Posts: 3

Re: LiveCD access to hard drive

..There isn't 1 person in 100 who wants to learn this ugly series of commands.

Yes there is! and anyway who cares if they don't want to, it's THEIR loss not ours!

You truly don't get it, do you. More users leads to more developers, leads to a better experience. Pushing potential users away harms the entire community.

pvsage

Internal Affairs

From: North Carolina

Registered: 2009-10-18

Posts: 9,250

Re: LiveCD access to hard drive

I have to take gordintoronto's position on this.  Hassle-free access to the internal HD should be a given, unless the drive is password protected or encrypted.  I can think of no reason why a user wouldn't want to go straight to his data files when trying out a distro on a Live CD, and for the vast majority of us, that data is on an internal drive.

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