Does the drive let you write to it if you log in as root?

I am having a similar problem with USB on my FC5 computer.
The difference is that my flash drives wont mount!
the link to my thread is below:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=551071

xenmaster,

If the actual file system on your drive is FAT, take a look at post #10 on this thread and decide if it might be relevant to your situation. As I understand it, fs=floppyfss means your actual file system is either FAT or ext2. If the speculation on this thread is correct and you are using FAT, a reformat might be your only option. If you have room somewhere, you could back up your files somewhere, reformat and copy them back. If your drive actually has an ext2 file system, then I don't know what your problem might be. But then I don't think a umask for the disk would make any sense for ext2.

Hern_28,

logging in as root or not doesn't matter at all. It is not to do with permissions, but with some basic filesystem attribute, or something.

blackhole45,

the volume was factory formatted as fat32. I haven't changed that. I don't think the problem lies in too many files on the volume, but I could be wrong. There are no directories that contain huge amounts of files, however.

I cannot back up my files as of yet. I was planning to buy a NAS (Network Attached Storage) harddisk for that purpose. Things got delayed a bit because I want to have one fast external harddisk that I can use in windows and in linux and one possibly slower (network) harddisk that can be used for backup in both windows and linux. At present however, my external usb harddisk (Western Digital My Book Premium Edition), which did work fine with another win98se computer in combination with a usb2/firewire add-on card, refuses to work in windows 98se on this computer, through usb1.1 or through the usb2 add-on-card, and only works in linux through usb1.1, and then only read-only. So instead of having usb2 and firewire access to this drive, I now have none, and only partial usb1.1 access in linux. I cannot even backup my data to this drive so that I can install windows xp to check whether it will work in winxp. I am stuck. I bought this particular drive because it would work in windows 98, which it does, but which it doesn't now and here. I could find no information on its compatibility with linux, but there seemed to be usb harddisk support in linux and so I just took the chance, but now I'm left with a semi-defect product, as regards linux. On someone else's Ubuntu/Gnome desktop, it also became read-only. So now it is unusable. I will need to find some other means to backup my harddisk so that I can repartition and install winxp. Maybe I will get lucky and the My Book will be writable long enough so that I can pull it off in linux. One way out is to go ahead and buy that network harddisk, so that I can back up, but if I'm unlucky, that will mean I'm left without any speedy data-storage, only 100Mbit and usb1.1. If speedy external storage is beyond my system, I may need to go for an internal harddisk that I can build into a NAS at some later time, or for a NAS drive that I can take the drive out of. But at present I am confined to IDE unless I buy a SATA controller. But first I will need to try another USB2 controller, to see if speedy access is possible, but that is useless if linux won't budge anyway! This is becoming a complex figure, and just because of the usb2 controller not working, the failure of win98se, and the read-only-ness of linux.

So. Reformatting my drive is not yet an option because I have no backup and I want to wait with buying backup until I know what the complete picture will be; will my My Book work with Linux, will it work in Windows XP, will a different USB controller change the face of this situation, etc.

My first target is to back up through other means and then install winxp and see what comes next.

Somebody had me take a look at /var/log/messages by way of a tail. Although I had previously checked /var/log/messages to see if anything useful came up, and hadn't found anything, this time i got this log:

I guess a reformat might do the trick...

[edit]
If I try to connect to my usb2 controller (Sweex 4 port usb 2.0 & 2 port firewire pci card, with "VIA Technologies, Inc.: Unknown device 3028 (rev 61)") , I get the following:

Very bad! Suffice to say, it doesn't work.

xenmaster,

I just did some googling, and FWIW, several people are saying that when the vfat driver detects an error on the filesystem it remounts it read-only. I don't know if that is authoritative. You could try running fsck on it. But I would do so only as a last resort because you might end up making things worse. I think you would also need to find a way to keep it from automounting to do this since you should not fsck a partition that is mounted.

Good luck.

blackhole54,

Yes, I believe you are right. The driver encounters an error, and mounts read-only. I will need a backup, format, and restore, to fix this. I might try fsck, but only after I have done a backup . Strangely enough, in windows there is no problem.

I have tried to put windows Scandisk on the job, but Scandisk crashes whenever I select the external HDD.

Yesterday I bought a new USB 2.0 controller, and HOERA it works in linux, too! I now have usb 2.0 access to the drive in linux (still read-only of course) and usb 2.0 and Firewire access in Windows. (In linux the firewire driver exists due to some timeout).

What solution do you use when you want to have a portable HDD solution with >4GB files that is cross-platform? Fat32 has that 4GB limitation. NTFS is readable in linux and MacOS. The new NTFS-3G driver (http://www.ntfs-3g.org/) promises write support in linux. What is wisdom here? I could also create a second partition on the drive in NTFS for DVD-images, alongside the primary FAT32 partition for music and divx and the rest. What will linux do when it encounters two partitions on the external HDD? Will it mount as "/media/My Book_2"?

greetings, xen.

btw I can manually umount the filesystem. So running fsck is not a problem.

I have read reports of a MS Windows driver that can handle ext2/ext3. I have not used it and don't recall what it is called off the top of my head. You might look into it. Likewise, I have read about ntfs-3g, but have not used it.

I don't know what will happen if you add a second partition, but it is my understanding that Linux should handle it.

Yeah I've used the windows 2000/xp ext2 driver some while ago and it was reliable, but had a weird quirk, it would continually refresh my explorer window. A friend of mine also uses an ext2 driver but with his setup sometimes files couldn't be read ("access denied"), this was annoying. But I want to be able to go someone else who undoubtedly has a windows pc and use my external hdd just the same. So ext2/3 is not an option.

Thanx for your thought, anyway.

nice info in this thread. I got like three sticks and ten card laing around since they are full and useless. As I understand a lot of people do have this problem and there is two solutions as I see it, first to change the usb driver so it mounts it as rw even if there is some file problems or second try to solve the file problems and remount and this automated. I will reformat my disks now.

Thanks for the info so I understood the problem.