Fedora Core 5 - unable to write to external USB drive
 

Hello all. Stilll a newbie!!!! I have a dual boot system - Windowx XP & Fedora Core 5. IT works fine - my problem is I have an external 320gb hard drive, USB, used for data storage only - mp3, vid etc.
It works great in XP & DID in FC5. Now I have a problem. All of a sudden in FC5 I can only read the files - I cant write to the disc. I rip mp3 & ogg files etc in both XP & linux.
The drive is not mounted to a folder in the fstab file, it is simply plugged in & the icon is on my desktop - I am very happy to leave it like that (it used to work). If I right click over the drive>properties >permissions i get the message - cant write as read only drive.

Here is the reading from the /sbin/fdisk ls command:

Disk /dev/sda: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 38913 312568641 b W95 FAT32
/dev/sda2 * 1 1 0 0 Empty
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.


Any help would be greatly apprecaited - it must be something v daft - I really dont think I have changed anything....


Kevin

Try running a file system check on the drive (i.e. /sbin/fsck.vfat /dev/sda). It is possible that it may not have been unmounted cleanly once, and usually when that happens, it will get mounted read-only until it is fixed. I had that happen with a hfs external firewire drive.

take a look at the man page of fsck.vfat for more info.