I had another post and got some great advice, thank you to everyone who took the time, but I’ve learned so much over the last 2 days that I wanted to be more direct and clear since I’m still stuck. Mostly I just want to know if I’m on the right track, and if anyone had any advice. I don’t just want to get things working, I’d like to understand why. After a lot of digging, I feel like I might be close to getting it.

I have 4 secondary internal drives, and 2 external. They all mount as root 777, I can access things but I also use Emby server. Emby can see everything, but can’t write. So that said, here’s how it started to where I’m at, does this sound like I’m heading in the right direction?

1. CachyOS mounts to /run/media/user (the user folder has a lock on it) and I had to password/mount all drives at every reboot. I read something about /run being a temp folder so I looked into auto-mounting after some advice.

2. I learned how to set up auto mount with gnome disk utility, which writes to fstab. Great! fstab hurts my brain after filling it up the last 2 days. I set them to mount to /mnt/drivename, and they auto mount at boot. So far so good!

3. I can now access my drives, so I began setting up my server. No problem this time! Emby sees the directories and scans them. Finally! However even though I can rw on the drives, Emby sees them as read only. Bummer.

4. Checking permissions, the drives are all mounted as root, with 777 permissions (which I suppose is why I can write to them but I don’t get why Emby can’t, maybe because it’s a different user?).

5. Time to get permissions! sudo chown does nothing. Still owned by root. Right click/permissions shows root:root, owner, group, other all can view and modify content, and it’s all greyed out. 'Cause it’s root, duh.

6. More digging, the drives are NTFS! Apparently Arch mounts NTFS with root ownership, permanently. This makes sense! I think I found my problem! Maybe.

7. Now I’m here, asking you wonderful nerds before I continue. I’m planning to change the mounts in gnome disk utility back to default (slider) and unmount and reboot. No idea if they’ll mount to /run or /mnt. Next, I have ntfs-3g installed and plan to run mount -t ntfs3 /dev/sdxY /mnt though I think I either need to create a drivename folder in /mnt or add mount -t ntfs3 /dev/sdxY /mnt/DRIVENAME the drive name to the end and it’ll create it maybe?

The other thing that’s bugging me is that gnome disk utility writes the mounts to fstab. I’m thinking if I do it this way, fstab will still have the old info and it’ll cause issues? Putting the slider back to default probably won’t just clear the fstab rules. That’d be too simple haha.

I’m totally not opposed to just reinstalling yet again and starting from scratch, if my plan will work. Any guidance is greatly appreciated!

EDIT: I think I got it! For anyone with the same issue, I added uid=1000,gid=1000 to the end of the options strings in gnome disk utility. I am now the owner of the drives, Emby can do what it needs to do, and the permissions stuck after a reboot! Now I just gotta look into why that worked haha.

EDIT 2: Spoke too soon. After a reboot they were ro for Emby again. I added rw to the drive options and it worked again. But after another reboot, no go again. Turns out after each reboot unmounting then remounting works. Not sure if there’s a way to make this work. Maybe they mount too soon? I dunno, but for now it’s functional.