title: Why can't I access this folder?
body: <p>A while back I bought a 1TB USB external drive. I formatted it ext4 in Ubuntu and copied a bunch of files / folders to it from several machines, all to /home/machinename/whatever, respectively.</p>
  
  <p>At some point I ran a chmod -R shell command on it to change the permissions. That was months ago and I don't remember what I typed but it made the drive so I could only access its /home folder as root. This wasn't a problem because I could still access everything, but today I decided to try to fix it.</p>
  
  <p>I went to my shell as root, went to that drive and typed:</p>
  
  <pre><code>chown -R rick:rick ./
  chmod -R 666 ./
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>It seemed to work.  That home directory and everything else in it now shows up as rw for each:</p>
  
  <pre><code>rick@rick64:/media/aaaaaaaa-bbbb-cccc-dddd-eeeeeeeeeeee$ ls -l
  drw-rw-rw- 7 rick rick 4096 2012-03-04 13:08 home
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>So, if I try to access that directory with the shell, I get:</p>
  
  <pre><code>rick@rick64:/media/aaaaaaaa-bbbb-cccc-dddd-eeeeeeeeeeee$ ls -l
  drw-rw-rw- 7 rick rick 4096 2012-03-04 13:08 home
  rick@rick64:/media/aaaaaaaa-bbbb-cccc-dddd-eeeeeeeeeeee$ cd home
  bash: cd: home: Permission denied
  rick@rick64:/media/aaaaaaaa-bbbb-cccc-dddd-eeeeeeeeeeee$ _
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>When I access it with nautilus I can see the multiple machine names within the /home/ folder, but they all appear with a file icon.  I can right-click on them and choose "Properties" but it won't let me see the permissions.</p>
  
  <p>Am baffled.  Why can't I access that folder?  I'm the owner?  I'm even the group.  I have r/w privileges.  What am I doing wrong?</p>