Here is something that I haven't seen before. I have my jumpdrive that I have all my school work on. Gizmo Jr. 1GB... nothing fancy. A relatively new Slackware 12.2 install (installed a couple days after its release).

Here's the deal:

I plug my jumpdrive in, HAL recognizes it, I mount it via clicking on the icon on my desktop (XFCE4). Jumpdrive works, I can open my documents or whatever.

BUT, if I open a thunar window and go to my jumpdrive, and go in a few directories (say /media/disk/School/Assignments/someclass/), it shows things as read-only. So I go back a directory to change permissions on the folder... The folder is read-only. Go back another directory, and that directory is read-only.... but if I only access a couple files at a time, and don't browse the drive with thunar it works great (rw)... My groups for my user are accurate, otherwise I wouldn't be able to mount the drive.

Mount displays:

cat /etc/group | grep "username" displays:

I highly doubt that groups are the problem, because i can mount, read, write to the device, as long as I don't open too many documents at a time, or browse too much of the drive. Note... I can browse the drive with terminal (xterm, terminal, rxvt, etc) all I want without consequence.

So is Thunar to blame? I reinstalled xfce with hopes that thunar just got corrupted or something, but that did not fix the problem.

Note: I don't have KDE installed, because I don't care for it all that much. XFCE has/does everything I need, and does it faster than kde (again, my opinion... don't want to start a discussion on speed, whats better please, Thanks).

Any ideas?

P.S. I do realize the vfat file system has a file name length problem that sometimes makes a device become read-only, but I can assure you my filenames are not beyond that limitation.

The vfat filesystem doesn't contain linux permissions so either the entire filesystem is writeable or not. It is determined when you mount. One caveat is that if a read error is detected, the filesystem will be remounted read-only.

When you mount pendrives, make sure that the "noatime" mount option is used. Entering "mount" by itself will print out the options used to mount it.

noatime did the trick.... if I add that to my fstab.

What is the easiest way to make HAL mount the drive with noatime? Even if it only does it with sdb1?

As a side-note, if I have thunar open and I drag a file (say a .tar.gz file) into a folder, thunar pegs out at 100% CPU, until I stop dragging. But if I have 2 thunar instances open and drag from one window to another it works fine, no processor spike. Any thoughts on this?

I realize now that this was a stupid question on my part. If anyone is curious about this, the ubuntu forums helped me out. I realize I am running Slackware, but udev is udev.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=988150

Hope this helps someone else out.

Thanks