How to make Firewire drive writable again?

[Paul DeShaw]

Greetings,

First, the history.

I have a Firewire hard drive for audio recording.  I had a laptop with
MacOSX, JACK, and Ardour.  I had Ubuntu Studio Gutsy installed on a
desktop.  I wanted to be able to share Ardour sessions between these two
systems using this Firewire drive.  After doing research and asking online,
I decided to format the drive HFS+, unjournaled. (FAT32 would have limited
me to 4GB files.  In retrospect I wish I'd just used that instead of HFS+)
There were problems at first, but eventually, it worked.  I was able to go
back and forth between the Mac and Ubuntu Studio with the same drive.  (Side
note: Eventually very strange behavior ensued on the Mac/Ardour, documented
on the Ardour forums.)

I eventually installed Ubuntu Studio Hardy on the MacBook.  Much tweaking
ensued, but eventually I was able to acess this disk with the MacBuntu as
well.  Read and write, everything worked.  So I now had three systems
reading and writing files and folders on this drive: MacBuntu, MacOSX, and
Ubuntu Studio Gutsy.

Then came the Upgrade from Hell.  I attempted to upgrade Ubuntu Studio from
Gutsy to Hardy, and many things broke.  I cleared out some space, and did a
clean Hardy install, keeping the old Gutsy so I could access files, until I
figure out how to move everything.

Now, I find that no Linux system can read and write to this drive anymore.
For example, if I open Nautilis as root, and try to drag and drop a
Rosegarden session onto this drive, I get an error message that says,

Error while copying to "PPA1.2":

The destination is read-only

Looking at the permissions in a terminal, it says

pad at Studio909:~$ ls -l /media
total 12<snip>
drwxrwxrwx  1 root root   19 2008-06-22 22:46 PPA1.2

I don't know how to open permissions any wider than that.

I have installed the same tools for HFS+ that worked on the other systems,
but still the drive is closed. Neither the new Hardy desktop, the old Gutsy
desktop, nor the MacBuntu can write to it anymnore.  These last two were
working perfectly fine before the Hardy install.   MacOSX "just works", as
before.   I had the drive plugged in and turned on during the install, so
maybe that did something to it.

So, how do I acess the work I have on this drive?

--Paul in Seattle
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