Only Root Can Mount on Raspberry Pi

Question

I am new to UNIX and I have been trying to setup Transmission on my new Raspberry Pi. I have formatted my external USB drive to ext4 and added the following line to the /etc/fstab.

/dev/sda1         /media/USB96    ext4    defaults           0       0

It works fine but when I login as pi (instead of root) it returns an error when mounting the drive

mount: only root can do that

I'm stuck here because when I try to download a torrent with the Transmission web interface it also returns an error:

Permission denied (/media/USB96/torrents/complete/my torrent link)

Please help me to solve this problem and tell me how to allow the normal user pi to mount and have access to the USB drive.

Solution

You should change your /etc/fstab entry to this:

/dev/sda1         /media/USB96    ext4    defaults,user           0       0

According to the fstab(5) manpage, the user option allows any user to mount the file system.

Comments

[Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams]

Depends on other factors.

[Damanjit Singh]

Which factor, will you please explain?

[Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams]

Whether or not you're running anything that will automount it.

[Damanjit Singh]

If you have any good tutorial in mind on how to setup transmission with external usb, please tell me.

[Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams]

Transmission doesn't get "setup" with an external USB drive.

[Damanjit Singh]

help me please!

[Rain]

Sorry. I meant /media/ instead of /mnt/. Check my edit above. If you noticed this already, as pi, can you cd /media/USB96 and create a file with touch test.file? If not, what error does it throw?

[BowlesCR]

This is the "proper" way to do it. Alternatively, if the device names aren't predictable, use sudo.