Can mount external USB drive but cannot read or write to it

[Peter Smerdon]

On Tue, 2008-11-04 at 17:03 -0800, Jonathan D. Armendariz wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I have a bit of an issue. I have a small USB drive that I've managed to 
> reformat using GParted in EXT3. The drive will mount on my desktop just 
> fine and will let me click open the icon for my drive but that's where 
> it stops. I've been completely unable to copy files to it or even copy 
> the "lost+found" icon from it. The error I get copying from it is that I 
> do not have permissions to read it and copying to it I get something 
> like permission denied. I have been able to take the drive to a Windows 
> PC and I can "see" the drive in the disk management console as well as 
> the device manager. I've also tried to reformat the drive but I get the 
> same results. Perhaps I'm missing something here? Any help in this 
> matter would be greatly appreciated! Thank you kindly.

I would mount the drive and then do a
sudo chown -R
yourusername:yourusername /media/whereever/thedrive/is/mounted

this basically changes the user and group permissions of the drive to
yourself. I would guess the drive gets mounted somewhere in /media but
you need to check that is the case.