delete .Trash (or anything else) in (read-only mounted) USB sticks

[Kevin O'Gorman]

On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 12:40 PM, Paul Sladen <ubuntu at paul.sladen.org> wrote:
> On Fri, 12 Oct 2012, oxy wrote:
>> I wanna delete this .Trash from my usb stick:
>>         Read-only file system
>
> I suspect that the filesystem on the USB stick is corrupted.
>
> In this case, Ubuntu will only allow read-only access, to avoid any
> additional damage occuring to what is already on there.  This is the
> meaning of the 'errors=remount-ro' you will see if you run 'mount' on
> its own without any parameters.
>
> You can try to force the USB sticked to be remounted read-write with
> something like:
>
>   mount -o remount,rw /media/xxx/
>
> and this will then enable the deleting of material stored on the USB
> ('/.Trash' included).  However at this point, if it's a corrupted
> filesystem you probably want to acquire a new USB stick and copy over
> the important stuff.
>
>         -Paul

Such corruption need not be fatal.  Most such sticks come with Windows
formatting.  Windows has repair utilities, and Linux may as well.  In
any event, you do not need to trash it.  You can just copy stuff off
of it and reformat like any other drive, to vfat, ntfs, ext{2,3,4} or
whatever.

-- 
Kevin O'Gorman

programmer, n. an organism that transmutes caffeine into software.