Cannot change ownership mounted drive from root

[Watermann]

Hello, absolutely new here to the kubuntu distro and stumbled across this problem.
After changing permissions to "owner" and "group" for the mounted drive /dev/sda2
In terminal:
sudo chmod u=rwx,g=rwx,o= /dev/sda2
resulting in
brwxrwx---
I changed the ownership from root to watermann:
sudo chown watermann /dev/sda2
After giving password and then hit enter everything seemed o.k. by typing:
ls -l /dev/sda2
which resulted in
brwxrwx--- watermann disk8

After returning to that mounted drive everything was still owned by root and I could not do anything.
What am I doing wrong or what did I forgot to do?

[Qqmike]

or what did I forgot to do?

So you have a hard drive, looks like sda, and you can't access partition 2, sda2.
How is sda2 mounted?

To see how everything is mounted, you could run
mount
or, perhaps
cat /etc/mtab

Try using that result in your statements? (instead of /dev/sda2)

[Qqmike]

Here's what I have done in the past.
Suppose my problem partition is sdc1, mounted at /media/sdc1.
Then:

Ownership: change owner and group to mike
sudo chown -R -v mike:mike /media/sdc1
sudo is needed because until the command executes, root is the owner of the folder sdc1.
The -R option means “recursively” so ownership is changed for the directory sdc1 AND its contents.
To see it work, use the verbose option -v.

Permissions: change to rwxrwx---
sudo chmod -v -R 770 /media/sdc1
changes the entire sdc1 directory (including (recursively -R) all its contents) to rwxrwx--- (for the owner mike, the group mike, and others).

(From Part 2 of my How-to:
https://www.kubuntuforums.net/forum/...sole-beginners )

(I am not the expert. I use "cookbook" methods I've tested.)

[Watermann]

I did this:
cat /etc/mtab
which resulted in this line:

/dev/sda2 /media/watermann/HOME-bkp ext4 rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 0

I have not the foggiest idea how to interpret this.

[Watermann]

Here's what I have done in the past.
Suppose my problem partition is sdc1, mounted at /media/sdc1.
Then:

Ownership: change owner and group to mike
sudo chown -R -v mike:mike /media/sdc1
sudo is needed because until the command executes, root is the owner of the folder sdc1.
The -R option means “recursively” so ownership is changed for the directory sdc1 AND its contents.
To see it work, use the verbose option -v.

Permissions: change to rwxrwx---
sudo chmod -v -R 770 /media/sdc1
changes the entire sdc1 directory (including (recursively -R) all its contents) to rwxrwx--- (for the owner mike, the group mike, and others).

(From Part 2 of my How-to:
https://www.kubuntuforums.net/forum/...sole-beginners )

(I am not the expert. I use "cookbook" methods I've tested.)

Yes!! Your procedure worked.
Thank you very much.

[Qqmike]

We got lucky! :-) 👍

[Qqmike]

as for fstab, I never/seldom have to mess with it and haven't read this in a long time:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Fstab