My USB drive is read-only: I want to be able to write on it

Cyberman · 10-25-2014, 01:57 PM

Hello, all

For some odd reason, my USB jump drive is set to read-only. I don't know how it got that way, but I want it so that I can write data to it. I'm using Debian stable.

How do I go about doing this?

schneidz · 10-25-2014, 01:59 PM

this happened recently to my xbmc-live drive. it was something called smart-control which would determine how many sectors were bad and if it thought the drive was failing, it would prevent it from being written to so you can copy all the stuff off of it and buy a new one.

Cyberman · 10-25-2014, 02:30 PM

Well, I don't know if the drive is failing. It's a USB stick. I'd like any better answers. I just think some programmatic configuration is not where it should be. Perhaps someone got ahold of my computer technology and jacked with it: I had been attempting to help some people with computer science, but maybe they defrauded me and jacked with my stuff.

jefro · 10-25-2014, 02:31 PM

Try to make a new partition.

If you can't by using root and if the drive has no external or internal protection then it is bad. Recycle it.

ceyx · 10-25-2014, 03:21 PM

As jefro hints, I've seen some usb sticks with a tiny microswitch on them to disable the write line. Too easy ?

frankbell · 10-25-2014, 09:43 PM

I have had USB sticks go read only.

Usually in my experience, unmounting them, removing them, and remounting them has cleared that up.

Did you try to access the drive as root? It might be an ownership issue.

It might also be worthwhile to test the drive on another computer to see whether the read-only issue occurs there or whether it's specific to the Debian box.

ferrari · 10-26-2014, 03:18 AM

With the device connected, what is reported by the following?

Code:

mount

Code:

sudo /sbin/fdisk -l

Sometimes, file-system corruption can cause the media to be mounted read-only. If this is the case, then once we know the file-system type, it should be possible to fix the inconsistent state, so that it can be mounted read-write again.

Rubian · 10-26-2014, 09:06 PM

Try, sudo chown -R user/path/to/usb