How To Make USB Drive Writeable?

[Nils Kassube]

Mark Greenwood wrote:
> I have an external USB hard drive. When I connect it to my computer,
>  running Karmic, the New Device Notifier thing pops up and says I've
>  inserted a new disc and would I like to open it with Dolphin. "Why
>  yes I would", I reply, "otherwise why would I have plugged it
>  in?".... Ahem... 

Well, maybe you don't want to use it now but want to reformat it, which 
means that it should not be mounted. :)

>  Anyway, a Dolphin window for the drive duly opens
>  but I do not have permission to write files to it. Why does the
>  system allow me to mount the disc as a normal user and then forbid
>  that user to write to it? It's extremely unhelpful.

What type of file system is on the disk? If it is something like FAT, 
you should have write permission already. But if it is ext2/3/4 the 
permissions of individual files / directories are stored in the file 
system. You could use the command

sudo chmod 777 /media/disk

where you would replace the /media/disk with the actual mount point. 
Then everybody may write to the root directory of the disk. But beware, 
write access for everybody also means that everyone can delete 
everything from the disk.


Nils