Alex,
Files are stored on your file system and are pointed to by inodes. Inodes contain file metadata such as access controls, creation/modification/access time, and its user ID.
When you list files with commands like ls
or stat
, they map the UID to a username using /etc/passwd as the key. You can tell them to not resolve UID->username by ls -n $file
or stat -c %u $file
.
If you type id
, you'll see the current UID under which you're operating. If the UID of the files on the other partition is different than your current UID, you'll see this problem. If you have root access, you can change the ownership of the files to be your regular user's UID (man chown
), the UID located in your current operating system's /etc/passwd file. Then you should be able to access the files as your regular user.
That is, if your problem is a UID mismatch :)