Can't write to my usb drive, the frustrations of linux have found me again
 

Hello, I can't save a file to my usb drive unless i use sudo.

I have a 160GB iOmega fat32 drive that automounts with this entry in fstab:

/dev/sdb1 /media/160GB vfat auto,users,uid=1000,gid=100,dmask=027,fmask=137,utf8 0 0

I have tried running sudo chmod -R 777 /media/160GB/

It seems to complete, but i still can't save. I am using the default user ubuntu creates as this is a fresh install.

I am willing to try to figure it out, but most people would have given up on this a long time ago. Please help me with this.

Try changing the fmask and dmask

Formatting the volume with a Linux-native file system might be an alternative solution. I format my external USB drives with EXT3 to avoid hassles. I don't know if that would be a good option for you or not.

what's the output of this?

And I think the masks you are setting would be the cause of the problem.

would chown work?
chown it to you own it and its on a group ypu can write to?
as in
sudo chown youruser:yourgroup /media/160GB

From your post I'm assuming you put an entry in fstab. Comment out the entry and let your desktop do the mounting.
Entries in fstab override desktop auto mounts. Fat has no security so it's not the format of the volume. The other thing I might suggest is to chown the mount point 'chown myname:myname /media/myvolume' or something on those lines.

Regards

I don't think it would work. If it's a fat/ntfs mount, permissions that apply are the ones set on mount.... if he were using native partitions (ext3 and so on) chown would do the trick.

Did you try adding "rw" to the mount options? Show the output of mount relative to your drive.

Apart, as you've been suggested, if you comment the entry in fstab, nautilus should mount automatically the device when you plug it in. Give it a try.

OK,

The command: ls -ld /media/160GB

Got me:
drwxr-xr-x 23 root root 32768 1969-12-31 16:00 /media/160GB


Trying this using sude gave me:
chown: changing ownership of `/media/160GB': Operation not permitted

I'm hoping to have kubuntu automount and am using kubuntu 10.10 to be exact. This drive is always plugged in.

What fixed it was changing the fstab entry to:

/dev/sdb1 /media/160GB vfat auto,user,fmask=0111,dmask=0000 0 0


Thanks for all the help.