[SOLVED] mount: /dev/sdc1 is write-protected, mounting read-only Why?

maschelsea · 10-22-2020, 11:24 PM

I don't expect you guys to answer this question in the time I need the answer. My wife and I are going out of town early tomorrow. She asked me to add a new CD that I have acquired to the thumb drive that feeds her car radio. I've always just plugged the drive into my desktop and mounted it and gone on copying tracks. It's always "just worked". Now it's not. Now it gives me the error you see in the subject line of this post. I don't understand why this is happening. The drive is write protected, so the system is mounting it read-only. I get that. But how do I change it if it's mounted read-only? Is there some switch I can pass to mount that will make my drive writable again? The fstype is vfat, if that matters....

Code:

root@caitlyn:/otherstuff/othermp3# fdisk -l]
...
Device     Boot Start       End   Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/sdc1        2048 122606847 122604800 58.5G  c W95 FAT32 (LBA)

maschelsea · 10-22-2020, 11:40 PM

I THOUGHT I found the solution, but I was wrong.

sgosnell · 10-22-2020, 11:47 PM

USB flash drives can fail. It may have just worn out. Have you tried a different drive? They're cheap, so a spare or three would make things more convenient.

maschelsea · 10-22-2020, 11:48 PM

This is the 64G drive. From Sandisk IIRC. So, not cheap. Even if we can afford to drop $64 three times. Not cheap.

berndbausch · 10-22-2020, 11:57 PM

Normally, write protection is achieved with a physical switch on the drive.

The drive might have detected some failure and switched on write protection. Try resetting it with hdparm -r0 /dev/sdc, but if the drive is really broken, you are probably out of luck.

maschelsea · 10-23-2020, 01:01 AM

Yeah. I think this drive IS going bad. We'll just have to pick up a new one the next time we go to Wal-Mart...

masterclassic · 10-23-2020, 04:20 AM

Hello.
You can try to check what happens when you plug the stick to the USB port through the output of the command "sudo dmesg" in the terminal window. Hardware errors are often detected this way. Lunch the command before connecting the stick to the connector.

By the way, since many years there is no write protect switch anymore on the usb pendrives. I didn't see it since my first one, a 512MB device, about 15 years old (it still works. Several other ones, bigger and newer, are unfortunately dead).

sgosnell · 10-23-2020, 10:22 AM

I just bought a SanDisk Fit Mini, 64GB, from Best Buy for $10.99. 64GB will hold a lot of music. My entire collection, 3000+ songs, fits on a 32GB drive with several GB left over. But if you need that much storage, it's available for not much money.

I recently had a SanDisk 32GB drive go south in much the same way you listed. I tried everything I could think of or was suggested here, just for the learning experience. That drive is now in a landfill.