Another approach to my RO drive issue...

[Nils Kassube]

Anthony Papillion wrote:
> OK, so I've followed everyone's advice and I still can't get RW access
> to my external USB hard drive. I think the issue is that the FS was
> created under WinXP and is either NTFS of FAT32 (can't remember which)
> and that I don't 'own' the FS. So, here's another approach I'd like to
> take but am not sure how: how do I force Ubuntu to format the external
> drive as a Linux fs and take ownership of it?
>
> FYI, the drive is at /mnt/sda5

You will loose all existing data on the disk, but you sure know that 
already. The commands would be "sudo umount /dev/sda5" and "sudo 
fdisk /dev/sda". Change the file system ID of partition 5 to 83 (= Linux) 
with the "t" command and write the partition table to the disk with 
the "w" command.

Next use "mke2fs -j /dev/sda5" to format the disk with ext3 file system. 
Now the disk is formatted and you can mount it to whatever mount point 
you like, e.g. "mkdir -p /mnt/sda5 && mount /dev/sda5 /mnt/sda5".

But the disk still belongs to root only. Therefore make a directory which 
belongs to a regular user. I assume, you are still using the live CD, 
therefore the regular user is "ubuntu". The commands would be "sudo 
mkdir -p /mnt/sda5/mydir" and "sudo chown ubuntu:ubuntu /mnt/sda5/mydir". 
Now you can copy files from your Windows disk to the external disk to the 
directory /mnt/sda5/mydir.

As the user name is not stored, but the user ID, the files will belong to 
the user with the ID 1000, when you later mount the USB disk on a real 
system. If necessary you can change the ownership when it is mounted on 
the real system then.


Nils