which forum for help with enabling write access on my different drives? please

I have a bunch of partitions that I need write access too... the usb drive seems to be the problem and i've tried the man pages but cant make sense of it. I would appreciate help

You'll get much better help by providing data.
What have you done, what messages do you get. What evidence do you have to suspect a dud drive ?.

When you connect the drive, what happens?---eg does anything appear in the file manager? If not, open a terminal and do

sudo fdisk -l

and see if your partitions are listed.

I can see the partitions but when i try to access files to view or modify i cant....




Disk /dev/sdc: 1000.2 GB, 1000215674880 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121602 cylinders, total 1953546240 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00035292

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 * 63 204796619 102398278+ 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sdc2 204796620 622984634 209094007+ 83 Linux





the /dev/sdc2 is the one i dont have proper access too... sorry about the lack of info, I didnt know how to get that before

Microsoft Windows formatted drives ( NTFS) are normally auto mounted as READ ONLY
for your protection from windows viruses ,for one

i take it this is AUTO mounted and was not set by you in /etc/fstab

one way is to add a mount point in that file and set it "rw"

just google " fstab" and you will get more information than you will ever need

something like this

/dev/sdc1  /mnt/Windows           ntfs-3g         defaults        1 0

oops i was looking as the first (sdc1)

O.K., let's see the output from

mount | awk '/^\/dev\/sdc2/ {print ;  system("ls -al "$3) ; }'

Update: John, sdc2 isn't NTFS.

bomber@daquadcore:~$ mount | awk '/^\/dev\/sdc2/ {print ; system("ls -al "$3) ; }'
/dev/sdc2 on / type reiserfs (rw,notail)
total 18311
drwxr-xr-x 25 root root 744 Jun 29 04:09 .
drwxr-xr-x 25 root root 744 Jun 29 04:09 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 3920 Jun 22 04:12 bin
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 1056 Jun 29 04:10 boot
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 80 Jun 23 2011 .config
drwxr-xr-x 14 root root 4460 Jul 15 16:58 dev
drwxr-xr-x 152 root root 7448 Jul 15 16:58 etc
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 104 Jun 23 2011 home
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 33 Jun 29 04:09 initrd.img -> /boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-26-generic
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 33 Jun 13 20:27 initrd.img.old -> /boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-25-generic
drwxr-xr-x 25 root root 2584 May 4 13:30 lib
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 88 Apr 27 01:38 lib64
-rw-rw-r-- 1 501 501 18708232 Aug 3 2011 libflashplayer.so
drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 392 Jul 15 16:58 media
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 48 Apr 21 2011 mnt
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 48 Jun 23 2011 opt
dr-xr-xr-x 179 root root 0 Jul 15 12:57 proc
drwx------ 16 root root 536 Nov 1 2011 root
drwxr-xr-x 21 root root 780 Jul 15 16:58 run
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 5088 Jun 13 00:31 sbin
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 48 Mar 21 2011 selinux
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 48 Jun 23 2011 srv
drwxr-xr-x 13 root root 0 Jul 15 12:57 sys
drwxrwxrwt 15 root root 576 Jul 15 17:00 tmp
drwxrwxr-x 13 501 501 296 Oct 13 2011 usr
drwxr-xr-x 13 root root 360 Jul 15 03:45 var
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 29 Jun 29 04:09 vmlinuz -> boot/vmlinuz-3.2.0-26-generic
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 29 Jun 13 20:27 vmlinuz.old -> boot/vmlinuz-3.2.0-25-generic
bomber@daquadcore:~$






thanks for the help guys

/dev/sdc2 on / type reiserfs (rw,notail)

Notice the "on /" part. /dev/sdc2 is your main system (root) partition. As a regular user you can't write to it. Nor should you.

The reference to USB threw me - I was expecting a mount at /media or somesuch. What does "df -hT" show ?.

the drive in question is definitely a usb drive..i have a 1 terrabyte external usb and the partition is 200 gigs that i use for downloads and storage.... something went sour..