Hi all,

Recently a colleague of mine told me that he was not able to delete a
particular folder in his flash drive, using a ubuntu machine.

I tried to help him, by using the 2 methods

1 GUI method

i just typed sudo nautilus to get the root browser and navigated to
flash drive folder in /media and tried to delete the file, but i got the
message permission denied,attempting to delete read only file system

2 using chmod

i tried to change the permission of the folder via chmod -R 777, command
then i got the message message permission denied,attempting to change
permission of read only file system

then i checked the folder contents via ls -l , to see if there is any
suid or sgid bit set but i didn't find any ?

then i entered rescue mode,but the flash drive was not detected,but i didn't try mounting

finally we had to take the flash drive to a windows machine to delete
the folder

NB: the only thing i could remember about the folder was it was copied
from the /usr/share/tomcat5.5 folder

it was mounted read only!

man mount

i don't think it was not mounted read only, as i was able to delete some other folders, only some folders were showing this problem.

What was the filesystem on the drive? If it is VFAT, then you don't use chmod. The permissions are determined when the drive is mounted.

Look at the file in the terminal. Try not to run graphical programs as root. If it is a Linux filesystem, check the properties and attributes.

ls -ld <directory_name>
lsattr <directory_name>

Another thing that can happen is that the filesystem has been damaged, and the error was discovered after deleted some directories. This can cause the filesystem to be marked as read-only. If there was a problem reading a file or directory, this could result in you having the same error given after subsequent write attempts.

[QUOTE=jschiwal;3466565]What was the filesystem on the drive? If it is VFAT, then you don't use chmod. The permissions are determined when the drive is mounted.

The file system was vfat

If it is a pendrive, I would suspect that there is a filesystem problem. The permissions and ownership are determined by the mount command and all files have the same ownership and permissions. All directories have the same ownership and permissions as well. So if you can remove one directory but not the other, I'd think that an error was found, and the kernel later refused to remove files to protect the filesystem from further damage. ( It could also be a problem with the device itself )

Actually I had this happened on some folders. I can remove all the files in the folders but the folder itself stays and there was no way to get rid of it. Just an empty folder 0 bytes. Not just linux, even windos on different mechines couldnt delete them. The cause was corrupted data. So I just had to back up all the files and reformat the stick.