Give jellyfin access to external hard drive

Posted by User2000

Im running this media server on a old laptop running linux. Upgrading it to run on a mac mini in a little while, but I have a hard drive with almost 2 TB of movies and tv shows that I want to throw on the Jellyfin server now so I can start enjoying them today. Is there any easy way to give Jellyfin access to see the hard drive?

1 replies

Chris wrote:

Welcome! Good news, this is a smooth one. Jellyfin only sees media SparkBox hands it — it watches one folder, MEDIAROOT, which shows up inside Jellyfin as /data. So you point that at your drive: 1) Mount the drive on your laptop and note its path (e.g. /mnt/movies). 2) In /opt/sparkbox/.env set MEDIAROOT to that path, then run: sudo sparkbox up 3) In Jellyfin, add a library and browse to /data — that's your drive inside the app, not the laptop path. If Jellyfin sees the folder but can't read the files, run sudo sparkbox check-media-perms — it grants read access safely, without changing who owns your files. Shout if anything snags!