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I was in the process of backing up data from my hard drive to an external usb drive when the drive suddenly became read only. Does anyone know how I can make it read/write again? I am using Debian Lenny and the drive is ntfs formatted. I have another ntfs formatted usb drive that is not effected in this way.
I was just dragging and dropping files one by one with the file manager. I copied one and it worked, then I tried to copy the next one and it gave me a message, "operation not supported".
However, it appears that it is not read only. I am able to delete. Interestingly, I deleted 2 files, then I was able to copy 2 files to the drive before it gave me the "operation not supported" message.
Is there a limit to the number of files I can put on the drive?
No there shouldn't be a limit on how many files unless, of course, you're out of disc space. If you were moving the files and not copying I could see the potential problem of the file being moved protected and incapable of being deleted. But you're copying so it's a mystery. You say the other external drive is set up the same way and it's not affected. I wonder if the enclosure circuitry is going bad? I've seen that happen. Just for kicks and giggles try changing enclosures and see what happens. Good Luck.
I believe I figured this out. Looks like the ntfs-3g drivers in Lenny are the problem. I tried the latest (10.04) ubuntu live cd and was able to add more files to the drive.
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