Write to external USB hard drive

Rob Roye · 06-23-2004, 01:26 PM

I'm having a problem with a USB hard drive. It is a laptop drive in a USB enclosure and is properly detected when I plug it in. I can read and execute anything on it. My problem is being able to write to it. It's formatted as FAT32 so I can use it for Windows as well as Linux, but thus far I cannot write to it. I tried changing the permissions to open it up totally but that failed.

I'm using it on Knoppix 3.3 on several different machines, including a couple laptops. Any ideas or suggestions would be helpful.

david_ross · 06-23-2004, 01:37 PM

Welcome to LQ.

What are the permissions on the files and what user are you trying to write as?
ls -l /path/to/mount

Rob Roye · 06-23-2004, 01:43 PM

Owner - read, write, execute
Group - read
Others - read

Running as user "knoppix" (mainly because I don't yet know the root password for Knoppix)

BTW - LOVE the signature - I annoyed a couple customers laughing so hard!

david_ross · 06-23-2004, 01:51 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Rob Roye
Owner - read, write, execute
Group - read
Others - read

Who is the Owner?

Quote:

Originally posted by Rob Roye
Running as user "knoppix" (mainly because I don't yet know the root password for Knoppix)

There isn't one

At a bash prompt "su -", no password required.

Quote:

Originally posted by Rob Roye
BTW - LOVE the signature - I annoyed a couple customers laughing so hard!

Thanks!

Rob Roye · 06-23-2004, 02:12 PM

Not entirely sure who the owner would be. I put the existing files on it in Windows. I'm fairly new to Linux, is there a way to tell who the owner is? It let me change permissions on the drive, so I assume it thinks I am.

david_ross · 06-23-2004, 02:18 PM

You won't be able to change the permissions on the drive since fat filesystems do not support linux file permissions but you can mount it as with a different umask such as umask="0000" which will let any user read or write to it.

To see the permissions:
ls -l /path/to/mount

To see where it is mounted - run:
mount

Rob Roye · 07-06-2004, 04:15 PM

I haven't had the time to test it any more recently, but I'm still going to try your advice. I'll probably just plug it in to my SuSE box at home and try it from there. Good suggestions so far, I'm learning from your posts.