How To Make USB Drive Writeable?

[Mark Greenwood]

On Saturday 23 Jan 2010 14:55:13 Nils Kassube wrote:
> 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. :)

Yeah OK, that's fair enough. I think things should be automounted but that's a personal perference I guess.

> >  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.
> 

It's ext4. (It's 1.5TB so FAT is not an option) The disk gets automounted at /media/Backups (Backups is the partition label so that at least is helpful). I initially tried 'sudo chown bob /media/Backups' - to change the owner of /media/Backups to be my normal user. But as soon as I unplug the disk, /media/Backups is also removed and the next time I plug the disk in I have to go through that process again. Creating /media/Backups before plugging the disk in causes it to be mounted as /media/Backups-1, so that doesn't work either.

While I understand that there are security considerations, I'm looking at this from the point of view of a *desktop* computer where I really don't care about multi-user access most of the time, I just want to be able to use my backup disc. And my chown solution preserves the security anyway. I just wish it would be remembered.

I've even tried adding a line to /etc/fstab to get the disc mounted at a predefined directory every time, but when I do this hal refuses to mount it and I have to 'mount /media/Backups' every single time I insert it, so that's not a solution either.

Mark

> 
> Nils
> 
>