External Hard Drive does not give me the permission to write
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We have a 140gb USB drive formatted with Vfat. It works fine with Windows, Suse and Ubuntu. I think vfat is the usual formatting for most modern USB storage devices especially solid state so I think it has fairly universal compatability. I myself am a little confused about the differance between the various fats. Did work tho :-)
I new to this forum and linux so plese bear with me. I'm running Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft and am unable to read data off of my external 250GB USB hard drive. The drive is formatted as FAT32 and I have the following entry in my /etc/fstab :
/media/TREKSTOR = mount point. This has to be an existing directory on you root fle system. for instance, for my ntfs hard drive I have /media/ntft and for my reiserfs harddrive I have /media/reiserfs
vfat = file system i.e. ntfs, fat32, ext3, reiserfs,
rw = read/write can be "ro" for read only
users = "rw" applies to all users logging into your system. "nouser" would mean only root has access.
noauto = will not mount on boot. "auto" mounts on boot.
0 0 = somthing to do with the order of backing up. go ask a guru!
Fix
I think you will be okay with editing your /etc/fstab with
Code:
/dev/sda1 /media/usb auto rw,users,auto 0 0
if you do start(kde start) --> run command --> "kdesu kate" you can edit /etc/fstab as root.
then, in the terminal input,
Code:
sudo mkdir /media/usb/
- we have to make this mount point exist.
then
Code:
sudo mount /media/usb/
and you should be able to access any USB drive that you put into you computer. . .hopefully :-)
/media/TREKSTOR = mount point. This has to be an existing directory on you root fle system. for instance, for my ntfs hard drive I have /media/ntft and for my reiserfs harddrive I have /media/reiserfs
vfat = file system i.e. ntfs, fat32, ext3, reiserfs,
rw = read/write can be "ro" for read only
users = "rw" applies to all users logging into your system. "nouser" would mean only root has access.
noauto = will not mount on boot. "auto" mounts on boot.
0 0 = somthing to do with the order of backing up. go ask a guru!
Fix
I think you will be okay with editing your /etc/fstab with
Code:
/dev/sda1 /media/usb auto rw,users,auto 0 0
if you do start(kde start) --> run command --> "kdesu kate" you can edit /etc/fstab as root.
then, in the terminal input,
Code:
sudo mkdir /media/usb/
- we have to make this mount point exist.
then
Code:
sudo mount /media/usb/
and you should be able to access any USB drive that you put into you computer. . .hopefully :-)
Thanks very much for your help on this slybob. I tried out what you suggested but unfortunately it did not work. I created a new directory as follows:
drwxrwxrwx 2 jmaroulis jmaroulis 4096 2007-01-29 07:19 usb
(By the way, when I did create this, the "usb" part was then highlighted in green, I don't know what this means...)
My /etc/fstab contains the following entry:
/dev/sda1 /media/usb auto rw,users,auto 0 0
When I fired up my external usb hard drive, it connects fine, icon created on the desktop, I can see the files, but the permissions on /media/usb get "reset" to the following:
drwxr-xr-x 154 jmaroulis jmaroulis 32768 1970-01-01 01:00 usb
And as a result, I'm unable to write to the drive (in fact, no user including root can either)...Would you or anyone have any further suggestions? Any help is appreciated.
Thanks to Junior Hacker and slybob for your help on this. Strange thing happened. I remember using a Windows application called SwissKnife to format my 250GB drive as Windows was unable to format a partition that big under FAT32. The format took less than a minute, so did it really format the drive?
I started to run QTParted in order to partition my external drive, as perhaps Ubuntu was not recognizing the file-system as FAT32 but NTFS as it was before I formatted it. After it read the drive and noted what file system was on it, I went ahead and resized the drive and created a new partition and formatted it to FAT32. After restarting the external hard-drive, I was now able to write to both partitions, weird.
I then put the size back to it's original and everything is now working fine. I will definitely keep slybob's settings for fstab and his full explanation and Junior Hacker's "force" commands as that helped the thought process.
Another smart move for anybody else who may read this thread.
When ever you go to install a Linux distribution, it is wise to plug in every peripheral you have or think you may use in the future and turn it on before starting the distro installation. Chances are your distro will set everything up right.
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