No permissions - Did I bonk my LUKS encryption?

Hello Linux Helpdesk. ;)

I use Fedora (currently 40), and have done for a while.

I always LUKS+Ext4 encrypt my local drive and decided to do the same to my external hard drive.

Last week I reinstalled Fedora 40 from a Bootable USB, but when I tried to access my files om my external drive it now gives me the error

You do not have permission to view the content of "Files".

I've read online it's due to me no longer being the "Owner" of the drive I was in my previous install of Fedora and now I'm a different user and apparently no users a part from Owner have any permissions on an EXT4+LUKS drive.

Is there any way to give myself permission to see the content again or did I bonk my backup? As a note, I DO have the correct Luks password, it shows me the name of the encrypted disk after decrypting, which is "Files"

Thank you in advance.

Edit: Thank you everybody, thanks to you I've been able to rescue my files. Y'all deserve a great day!

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21 comments

Use chown to change ownership or chmod to change rights. The -R option makes them also change the permissions for all files and directories inside of the directory.

sudo chown -R <username>:<usergroup> /pathto/Files

Arch man
- Another user suggests youruser:youruser and not usergroup, if usergroup would I just use the Owner group or?
  
  Thank you for your answer.
  
  I believe you can just do youruser: and chmod automatically uses the correct group. The other user is also technically correct as the usergroup is called the same as the user so both commands are the same.
  
  Typically the user group is identical to the username but not always. For example a name containing uppercase letters may be transformed to be all lowercase for the user but contain both cases in the group.
  
  Thus you should get the user group in scripting separate from $USER
  
  Those are placeholders. Your user has a name and is in a group. No idea what that group is called like. For root it is root:root
  
  youruser:youruser just means the user’s group. For instance, on my fedora 40 install, my user (bippy, just a silly name), is the username for my user, but also the name of the group that my user belongs to.
  
  So when I do a chown, I typically do chown -R bippy:bippy path/to/directory
  
  If you wanted to give permissions to a different group on your system, but also to your main user, you could do a chown -R bippy:wheel /path/to/directory (wheel is an example group name, which is similar to sudoers)
  
  Thank you, worked like a charm.
  
  Super!
- I would advise against that. Udisks2 should mount writable always.

21 comments