I just installed Porteus on a laptop and I really like it. But I had a USB flash drive with a "Redo" rescue thing on it. Well, I put the flash drive in Porteus and tried to copy a file to it and it wouldn't let me. Okay, so I took the flash drive out and put it in another one of my computers and deleted what was on there and re-formatted it. Then I put the flash drive back into the Porteus and when I did, two icons appeared on the desktop. One icon had the name of my flash drive and the other one "sdb."

So I experimented. Gparted showed my flash drive with my flash drive's name, mounted as /dev/sd1 and the mount point as /mnt/sdb1.

So I was working on a file in my flash drive (in LibreOffice) and after a while my flash drive icon was gone and the flash drive no longer appeared in the file system display.

So I opened the icon for the "sdb" and to my great surprise there appeared the files that were originally on the flash drive when it was the "redo" rescue thing. (which, remember, had (supposedly) been deleted)

Then when I went to unmount the "sdb" icon I got a window saying:

Authentication is required to unmount USB DISK 2.0 (/dev/sdb) mounted by another user: An application is attempting to perform an action that requires privileges. Authentication as the super user is required to perform this action.

Then it wanted my password.

I'd like to know I can reliably use my flash drive on the laptop (without it disappearing). And I wonder what's causing the two icons and,from my way of looking at it, the strange stuff that's happening.

And btw, if I open either my flash drive's icon or the "sdb" one I can only open one. When I tried to open both at the same time one was always unavailable.

Thanks.

I would start by checking the ownership and permissions on the partition and files on the flash drive the next time I mounted it.

You should be able to do that in a file manager. If you want to do it from the command line, it's likely mounted somewhere in /media/run/ or in /media.

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Thanks Frank. I checked the flash drive permissions and this is what I found (screenshot). Then when I couldn't change the permission to read and write (which is what I assumed I needed to do) on that window I followed the instructions in this link:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/3210...on-a-usb-stick

And that led to this:
(And I was sure it was the right drive.) Then I tried to change it in the permission window and it still wouldn't let me.

Any ideas on where to go from here?

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A little more information. When I put the drive in the laptop, it shows the two icons. When I click on the "properties" of the "Redo" icon it's all greyed out and on top it says: Root.

And then I can see it's mounted in the filesystem at /mnt

I don't really know what that signifies but I figure I'd mention it. My guess is the laptop somehow grabbed the USB flash drive when the laptop was in root and stored it in the /mnt directory, because I have several times already deleted what's on the flash drive and re-formatted it. And all other flash drives work normally on the laptop. And the questionable USB flash drive works fine in different computers. It's just in the laptop that this quirkiness happens. (But there must be reason for it, right?)

That's odd. It says that you have full access but your group does not, even though you are in your own unique group. I can't explain that. (Yes, I know all the cool hip distros are giving each user his or her unique group these days, but I've never seen a persuasive logical reason for it other than that it's the cool, hip, new thing that all the kids are doing.)

You could try not inserting the drive until you are logged in as user just to see what happens.

Another option is to put the device in /etc/fstab with "noauto" (device will not automount) and "user" (user has permissions) flags. To be extra thorough, when I add a device to /etc/fstab, I identify the device by UUID.

This link is a good howto about UUID--it's the one that guided me. It says it's about UUID and Ubuntu, but, really, it's about UUID and Linux: http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-f...-update-fstab/

Let us know what happens.

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Thanks Frank and thanks for the link. This is one of those things that I thought was going to be so easy that is turning out to be really complicated. I think it is interesting but I don't think it's worth all the effort and time of figuring it out when I can just use a different USB flash drive in the laptop. Thanks for trying to figure out this riddle, but for now I'm going to bail on it.

Drat. Sorry I couldn't help more.

If other flash drives work properly, there may be something going on with that particular drive.

I just looked back at my own blog (as distinct from the LQ one). The first record of my mucking about with /etc/fstab that I could find dated to 2007, almost three years after I started with Linux.

Hey Frank. Nah, you helped plenty. And your suggestions may be the solution. I'll re-visit them when I have more time. And I think there's nothing wrong with the drive because it performs perfectly in other computers. And it's been deleted twice and re-formatted twice. But it is somehow linked to what was on the drive when I first started using it in the Porteus (laptop). (I don't know how. It's like a drive on the laptop copied what was on the USB drive.) Yeah, now when I put the drive in, it triggers what is on the laptop's hard drive. I don't really understand them but maybe like those "symbolic" links that point a file to a directory.