Formating USB Disk became readonly
 

I recently bought three external USB 160g LaCie harddisks that I was hoping to use with RedHat Enterprize WS 2.6.9-5.EL. They came formated vfat, were recognized, and I was able to store and retrieve files from them.

I wanted to be able to store permissions so I tried to format one of them using mkfs.ext3. The disk formated but was then readonly. I was unable to figure out how to change it to readwrite and in trying everything I could think of, the disk is now not recognized by the system anymore. It's difficult to remember the things I had done, but they included changing fstab.

If I recall correctly, the command I used to format was: mkfs.ext3 -L Extern_Dsk2 /dev/sda1

Did I need to define a partition first? If so, how? fdisk? If so, it is strange the format proceeded.

I have been using Linux for about 6 months so I am a newbe, however, I was pretty perficent with OS2 so I think it is usually the basic concepts I am missing most of the time with Linux.

Anyone have any suggestions as to what to do next? But more than that, why did the disk become read only (even to root)? What should I have done instead of what I did do?

Thanks,

Rees

As a fairly new newbie, I can't say that my answer is definitive, but my guess is simply that the drive was being mounted as read-only. fstab would probably have had "ro" in the line for the drive, which would make it read only to everyone, including root. Why it was set up like this, who knows, but it is easy to change so no big deal I guess. Regards,

-Felix

Felix,

I can't be sure because the entry is not in fstab anymore, but I think it was something like this:

/dev/sdb1 /media/usbdisk2 ext3 pamconsole,noatime,sync,fscontext=system_u:object_r:removable_t,exec,noauto,managed 0 0

Rees