External hard-drive - readonly, can't make it read/write
 

Hi all...

I'm hoping there' someone out there who can help with a problem that has me **utterly** tearing my hair out....

I've just bought a Nexstar3 400GB external hard-drive. It has the ntfs filesystem on it (which I've heard is pretty standard/not unusual for external drives). Anyway - I am able to mount the drive, but can only do so as root, even though my old (small) USB external drive could be mounted by a normal user. Sheesh...

Ok, cut the long story short- I can mount the drive (as root) but can not copy anything onto it - it says "read-only filesystem". All I want to be able to do is -

a) Mount the drive as a normal user (not just as root) and -
b) Be able to copy files onto it.

Doesn't sound like I'm asking that much, but geez... this drive is just a paper-weight at the moment, and it's going out the window if I can't solve this in the next few days....

***Update*** - typing "ls -l /dev/sda1" gives this -
brw-rw---- 1 root plugdev 8, 1 2007-05-17 20:43 /dev/sda1

... and my entry in /etc/fstab is -
/dev/sda1 /media/400GB ntfs auto auto,users,rw 0 0

/media/400GB is what the drive identifies itself as.
Very many thanks for any help received... Bye for now -
- mooseman

You will need to enable NTFS Write support in your kernel. This option is most likely turned off. Google around the net for NTFS-3G as well.

Once you re-compile your kernel you should be all set to write to that external drive.

HTH,

Centinul

You can also use the fuse system to enable write access. However, as this is a new drive, why don't you format it in with a Linux filesystem?

Re: making external hard-drive read/write
 

Hi - thanks for this, jschiwal! ( and centinul too ).

*** UPDATE... SUCCESS!!!! ****
QtPartEd to the rescue!!!
Fired that up and formatted the drive as ext3. The progress-bar ticked over - Yes - it's doing something!
The real breakthrough was this post by user "stress_junkie" (which I should have read in the first place, so sorry for the "noise".... :-) )
That user's tips -
a) Add the drive to /etc/fstab as follows -
/dev/sda1 /media/usbdisk defaults 0 0

b) As root, mount the drive and change owner and permissions -
mount /dev/sda1 /media/usbdisk
chown root:users /media/usbdisk
chmod 777 /media/usbdisk

I've just run my backup script to copy files to the drive, and success!
Here's the proof -

andy@obsidian:~$ df -h /media/400GB
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 367G 3.9G 345G 2% /media/400GB
andy@obsidian:~$

Thanks all for your help!