Hello,

I've had a look at some similar threads but as I'm very new to linux they're already a bit technical for me. Sorry, this calls for someone with patience. I gather from other threads that disconnecting an external drive without unmounting is a no-no, and this seems to be the likely cause. Now the disk is read only and I'm unable to change any settings through the usual control panel on ubuntu. I'm just not familiar with the terminal instructions. I tried to cut and past a few command lines from other threads but I got some warnings that proceding could damage data. Like this one:

WARNING!!! Running e2fsck on a mounted filesystem may cause
SEVERE filesystem damage.

Do you really want to continue (y/n)?

Any advice would be welcome,
Thanks

This can create many disturbances .

So if u did that ,1st manually unmount by,

If u had mounted the external drive to /mnt .

When I try to unmount it says:

umount: only root can do that

The main issue for me is how to get my drive back to read/write?

Thanks

can you please post the output of mount and maybe df -h so we can see what is in your system.

you can try to sudo umount /dev/sda1 assuming your disk is sda1.
if it says you're not a sudoer then:
su -
umount /dev/sda1

usually mount -o rw /dev/sda1 /path/to/directory does the trick (it would have to be changed for your setup).

hlo,

so, your drive did work in the past on that distro?

ELSE maybe you have to install ntfs-3g to write to that drive (if it contains a ntfs-filesystem)

But first try the post from schneidz!

Thats why I wrote above ,

you should use umount in root mode and forcefully ,with -f option .