How To Make USB Drive Writeable?

[Reinhold Rumberger]

On Saturday 23 January 2010, Mark Greenwood wrote:
> On Saturday 23 Jan 2010 14:55:13 Nils Kassube wrote:
> > Mark Greenwood wrote:
> > >  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

You may want to do sudo chown -R bob /media/Backups/
That makes the chown command recursive.

(Just a guess, but I think:)
What you are actually doing with your command, is make the directory 
the drive is mounted to belong to you. Since that is deleted and 
recreated, it doesn't help.
If this doesn't work, try cd'ing to /media/Backups and applying the 
chown to the current directory. I know it will work somehow, since it 
works perfectly here.

> 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.

<snip>

> 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.

I don't think any solution involving fstab can be more than a 
workaround. Chown'ing is the solution.

  --Reinhold