USB external disk write permission. What have I done wrong?

[Derek Broughton]

Karl Larsen wrote:

>     Well I KNOW you can chown from the /dev/ address because I did it on
> MY USB hard drive. Worked fine and did not stop automount. Where do you
> get your info that it is risky to use /dev/???

On a single user system, it probably isn't that risky.  You either have
access to a device, or you don't and then you want to change either
permissions or ownership.  But as a general principle, somebody went to
some trouble to decide what the ownership of every device should be, and
when you change that, you risk preventing other users from accessing the
device.

On top of that, changing permissions or ownership of /dev nodes with chown,
chgrp and chmod is purely temporary - those settings are made by udev, so
unless you change the relevant udev rule, they get reset when you reboot.
-- 
derek