How To Make USB Drive Writeable?

[Mark Greenwood]

On Saturday 23 Jan 2010 16:00:45 Reinhold Rumberger wrote:
> On Saturday 23 January 2010, Mark Greenwood wrote:
> > On Saturday 23 Jan 2010 14:55:13 Nils Kassube wrote:
> > > Mark Greenwood wrote:
> > > >  Anyway, a Dolphin window for the drive duly opens
> > > >  but I do not have permission to write files to it. Why does
> > > >  the system allow me to mount the disc as a normal user and
> > > >  then forbid that user to write to it? It's extremely
> > > >  unhelpful.
> > > 
> > > What type of file system is on the disk? If it is something like
> > > FAT, you should have write permission already. But if it is
> > > ext2/3/4 the permissions of individual files / directories are
> > > stored in the file system. You could use the command
> > > 
> > > sudo chmod 777 /media/disk
> > > 
> > > where you would replace the /media/disk with the actual mount
> > > point. Then everybody may write to the root directory of the
> > > disk. But beware, write access for everybody also means that
> > > everyone can delete everything from the disk.
> > 
> > It's ext4. (It's 1.5TB so FAT is not an option) The disk gets
> > automounted at /media/Backups (Backups is the partition label so
> > that at least is helpful). I initially tried 'sudo chown bob
> > /media/Backups' - to change the owner of /media/Backups to be my
> 
> You may want to do sudo chown -R bob /media/Backups/
> That makes the chown command recursive.

This did the trick! Thanks everyone.

I had assumed that the permissions for /media/Backups would be somehow stored alongside the 'Backups' directory in /media and that therefore doing -R wouldn't help. I learned something today :)

Mark

> 
> (Just a guess, but I think:)
> What you are actually doing with your command, is make the directory 
> the drive is mounted to belong to you. Since that is deleted and 
> recreated, it doesn't help.
> If this doesn't work, try cd'ing to /media/Backups and applying the 
> chown to the current directory. I know it will work somehow, since it 
> works perfectly here.
> 
> > normal user. But as soon as I unplug the disk, /media/Backups is
> > also removed and the next time I plug the disk in I have to go
> > through that process again. Creating /media/Backups before
> > plugging the disk in causes it to be mounted as /media/Backups-1,
> > so that doesn't work either.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> > I've even tried adding a line to /etc/fstab to get the disc
> > mounted at a predefined directory every time, but when I do this
> > hal refuses to mount it and I have to 'mount /media/Backups'
> > every single time I insert it, so that's not a solution either.
> 
> I don't think any solution involving fstab can be more than a 
> workaround. Chown'ing is the solution.
> 
>   --Reinhold
> 
>