How To Make USB Drive Writeable?

[Nils Kassube]

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
>  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.

That's interesting because I have a similar setup for one external disk 
which is mounted by label. I changed the ownership of the root directory 
of the disk to nils:nils and the change persists if I unmount the disk 
and mount it again. My file system is ext3 and not ext4, but I think 
that shouldn't make a difference. I also tried the change I suggested in 
my previous mail and it persists over mounts.

> 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 think if you add the users mount option to the fstab entry it should 
be mounted by hal as well.


Nils