I'm trying to mount a usb drive in Helix(Ubuntu). But I can't access the files. Helix automatically mounts the external drive in read-only mode. So I umount the drive and try to mount it from command line with no success.

$sudo mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/usb -o rw

Then I run df to make sure it is mounted and can read data.

$df
...some output omitted...
/dev/sdc1 487699452 154030724 333668728 32% /mnt/usb

then I change to the directory unsuccessfully

$cd /mnt/usb
bash: cd: /mnt/test: Permission denied

sudo doesn't help either

$sudo cd /mnt/usb
sudo: cd: command not found.

Likewise I can't view the /mnt/usb directory in the graphic interface either.

I've also tried mounting with the -force and -t ntfs options with similar results

Any suggestions?

I know this is long but I wanted to be thorough.

Just a few thoughts: If you know the drive is formatted in NTFS, you'll want to mount it using the ntfs-3g utility, instead of with the regular Linux mounting capabilities. (The kernel has nfts support, but it does not have full write support like ntfs-3g does.) Not sure what the package name is in Ubuntu, but you can google that.

I'm not sure why your sudo can't find the 'cd' command, but you should be able to just run 'sudo su' to switch to the root user, and then run 'cd' or whatever other commands you want.

1 members found this post helpful.

You nailed it. I typed in ntfs-3g and it worked like a charm. I'd never done that before with any of my usb drives because all the others were FAT.

Thanks

Simple, cd is a command that isn't available as binary to be launched by sudo, it is an in-built command of the shell.