I've searched the forums, and I found an amazingly high number of threads on this topic, but I still couldn't dig up any answers, so I decided to make my own post.

I have a Firewire HD, I can mount it fine. I can copy from it, listen to my music, etc. But I cannot write to it.

I tried chmod 'ing it to 777, but it doesn't let me. I get "operation not permitted" errors.

I was thinking of just reformatting the drive, but I'd like to try a few other things first, so if you would like to lend a hand, I'd appreciate it.

For reference, I used this and it worked just fine, but still no write.

mount /dev/sda5 -t vfat /storage

And my /etc/fstab file contains zero lines related to /dev/sda5.

tobz

try this:
mount -t vfat -o rw -o umask=0 /dev/sda5 /storage

if this works, add to fstab:
/dev/sda5 /storage vfat auto,rw,umask=0 0 0

rw stands for read-write, umask=0 basically means that no restrictions on any user, auto specifies that it gets mounted automatically at boot.

Thank you very much, as that helped greatly! One question though...

I had a few files (actually, a couple hundred), that must have had some permissions that were read-only (or similar), because for each individual file, a little pop-up box told me "Could not change permissions for xx.x" What part of the mount command tries to change the permissions as it writes the file? Is it the "auto" part? Just curious.

Normally I would just try it out, but I have semi-sensitive data backed up on my drive that I don't want lost. Thanks.

T.J.

Disregard what I wrote about the auto part sentence. But I am still curious as to what tries to change the files permissions.

I'm not sure what it is that tries to change the permissions but the problem is that vfat does not support file permissions and this is why you get those error messages and why you have to set permissions through mount options or in fstab. If you don't want to see them, you can add a quiet option:
/dev/sda5 /storage vfat auto,quiet,rw,umask=0 0 0

Thanks!