I have two usb memory sticks/devices.

One is 256 meg. It is working. Files can be moved from the hard drive to the memory stick and vice versa.

The other is 1 gig. It shows up as:

mark@Lexington-19:~$ lsusb
Bus 004 Device 003: ID 3538:0054 Power Quotient International Co., Ltd

and

Disk /dev/sdb: 1010 MB, 1010826752 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 122 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x91f72d24

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 122 979933+ 83 Linux


but files cannot be read from nor files moved/copied to it.

From a LiveCD session, I have used GParted to partition and format the stick, time and time again.

This HH is less than 3 days old. All packages are up to date. No modifications to system files have been made. The device is listed in /media as a folder named: usb.

The main properties page shows the device as: ext3, but the Media Properties page shows ext2.

and: rw, nosuid, nodev, relatime

and under Permissions:

The "permissions" of the disk could not be read.

Try copying the files with a root terminal which can get over the permission problem.

Here's what I tried. I'm much a noob and not really sure of the command line structure.

mark@Lexington-19:/media$ sudo cp /home/mark/Desktop/cervantes /media/usb
mark@Lexington-19:/media$ ls -a
. cdrom cdrom1 disk-1 floppy0 .hal-mtab-lock usb
.. cdrom0 disk floppy .hal-mtab UDISK 28X
mark@Lexington-19:/media$

I don't see the file named cervantes in the /media

You have copied it to /media/usb so type
You can beome a temporary super user in Ubuntu too by command

Yes sir, I see I can cause the drive to have a file copied over to it under sudo. How can I change the device to be accessable to user: mark?

Do this in root
or for all of them
assuming mark is your username.