Dolphin unable to write to usb sticks.

[GrumpyGit]

Anyone know why I can't write to usb sticks? Popped the same sticks in my 14.04 machine and all's OK. EXFAT is installed.

One stick is a 16gb W95 FAT32 (LBA), the other is a 32gb sdcard from my phone. Both are writeable in 14.04.

Thanks.

[Snowhog]

What error message is displayed when you attempt to write to it?

[GrumpyGit]

Access denied, could not write to .

Plus the "create new.." option is greyed out.

[GrumpyGit]

...strangely enough, when I connect my phone , it can write to that without problems.

[oshunluvr]

They're not being mounted as accessible by your user. Have you run any GUI programs as root?

Open a terminal, and type

ll /media

You should see:


total 0
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 12 Aug 16 2016 ./
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 286 Jan 26 12:14 ../
drwxr-x---+ 1 root root 0 Jan 28 07:53 grumpygit/


I'm assuming your username is grumpygit. Then do

ll /media/grumpygit

and post the results of both commands.

[GrumpyGit]

Hey, thanks for the very quick reply and help. It's much appreciated.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
kev@Kubuntu-Rampage:/media$ ll
total 52
drwxr-xr-x 13 root root 4096 Jan 31 14:44 ./
drwxr-xr-x 25 root root 4096 Feb 3 11:06 ../
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 31 14:44 bitlocker/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 45 Okt 30 13:26 .directory -> /etc/kubuntu-default-settings/directory-media
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 42 Okt 30 13:26 .hidden -> /etc/kubuntu-default-settings/hidden-media
drwxr-x---+ 3 root root 4096 Feb 7 16:54 kev/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 31 14:44 mount/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 Dez 2 15:15 usb -> usb0/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dez 2 15:15 usb0/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dez 2 15:15 usb1/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dez 2 15:15 usb2/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dez 2 15:15 usb3/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dez 2 15:15 usb4/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dez 2 15:15 usb5/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dez 2 15:15 usb6/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dez 2 15:15 usb7/
kev@Kubuntu-Rampage:/media$

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

kev@Kubuntu-Rampage:/media$ ll kev
total 24
drwxr-x---+ 3 root root 4096 Feb 7 16:54 ./
drwxr-xr-x 13 root root 4096 Jan 31 14:44 ../
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 16384 Jan 1 1970 MUSIC/
kev@Kubuntu-Rampage:/media$

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

The media folder shows my 16gb USB stick which I mounted by clicking on it in Dolphin. It automatically mounts it of course.

I actually noticed this problem last week when I was recovering files from my Wife's work (Windows) laptop, hence the bitlocker folder. I tried then to copy the files to a USB hard drive but it was always showing as write protected. I ended up using a root terminal instead of Dolphin. I thought it was just her hard drive giving me grief so I didn't give it any more thought till I tried to copy some files to one of my sticks today.

Root commandline copying works fine, just not as a normal user through Dolphin.

EDIT: Just connected my phone and it mounts as an MTP device -

mtp:/GEM-702L/SD card/

...I guess that explains why my phone is read/write.

[Snowhog]

The issue here is that the mounted USB stick (kev) is being mounted/owned by root, not you. Also, the MUSIC folder on the stick is also owned by root.

In a konsole, with the USB stick mounted, type: sudo chown -R kev:kev /media/kev

[GrumpyGit]

kev@Kubuntu-Rampage:/media$ ll
total 52
drwxr-xr-x 13 root root 4096 Jan 31 14:44 ./
drwxr-xr-x 25 root root 4096 Feb 3 11:06 ../
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 31 14:44 bitlocker/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 45 Okt 30 13:26 .directory -> /etc/kubuntu-default-settings/directory-media
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 42 Okt 30 13:26 .hidden -> /etc/kubuntu-default-settings/hidden-media
drwxr-x---+ 2 kev kev 4096 Feb 7 18:19 kev/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 31 14:44 mount/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 Dez 2 15:15 usb -> usb0/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dez 2 15:15 usb0/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dez 2 15:15 usb1/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dez 2 15:15 usb2/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dez 2 15:15 usb3/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dez 2 15:15 usb4/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dez 2 15:15 usb5/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dez 2 15:15 usb6/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dez 2 15:15 usb7/
kev@Kubuntu-Rampage:/media$

It spat out millions of chown: operation not permitted errors (it's an exfat volume so permissions are not valid I believe), but it did change the ownership of the kev folder. I removed the stick and reinserted but still no write access!

Any idea why my mount folder was changed to root ownership? I certainly didn't do it - well, not knowingly anyway.

[GrumpyGit]

I should add - I just hot plugged my Windows SATA SSD and it mounts (through Dolphin) and is write enabled.

[GrumpyGit]

Completely removed exfat-fuse & exfat-utils and rebooted - strangely enough Dolphin can still mount the USB stick, albeit in read-only mode. My (uneducated) guess is that maybe something's not right with exfat-fuse :dunno

[GrumpyGit]

Tried to reformat the stick -



...and the output of fdisk -l :

root@Kubuntu-Rampage:/home/kev# fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sdb: 931,5 GiB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x3075484f

Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdb1 * 2048 1026047 1024000 500M 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sdb2 1026048 1953521663 1952495616 931G 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

Disk /dev/sdc: 111,8 GiB, 120034123776 bytes, 234441648 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x96d6dc7f

Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdc1 * 2048 234440703 234438656 111,8G 83 Linux

Disk /dev/sda: 14,9 GiB, 16008609792 bytes, 31266816 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sda1 32 31266815 31266784 14,9G c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
root@Kubuntu-Rampage:/home/kev#

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Output of mount -l :

root@Kubuntu-Rampage:/home/kev# mount -l
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
udev on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,nosuid,relatime,size=6112668k,nr_inodes=152816 7,mode=755)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode =000)
tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,size=1228672k,mode=755)
/dev/sdc1 on / type ext4 (rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro,data=ordered)
securityfs on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
tmpfs on /run/lock type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,size=5120k)
tmpfs on /sys/fs/cgroup type tmpfs (ro,nosuid,nodev,noexec,mode=755)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/unified type cgroup2 (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/systemd type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,xattr,name=system d)
pstore on /sys/fs/pstore type pstore (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/devices type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,devices)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/pids type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,pids)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/blkio type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,blkio)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/net_cls,net_prio type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,net_cls,net_prio)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/freezer type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,freezer)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/rdma type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,rdma)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/hugetlb type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,hugetlb)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuset type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,cpuset)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/cpu,cpuacct type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,cpu,cpuacct)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/memory type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,memory)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/perf_event type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,perf_event)
systemd-1 on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type autofs (rw,relatime,fd=36,pgrp=1,timeout=0,minproto=5,max proto=5,direct,pipe_ino=473)
mqueue on /dev/mqueue type mqueue (rw,relatime)
debugfs on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw,relatime)
hugetlbfs on /dev/hugepages type hugetlbfs (rw,relatime,pagesize=2M)
configfs on /sys/kernel/config type configfs (rw,relatime)
fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw,relatime)
tmpfs on /run/user/1000 type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,size=1228668k,mode=700,u id=1000,gid=1000)
root@Kubuntu-Rampage:/home/kev#

[Snowhog]

Was Bitblocker installed and enabled on this stick?

[GrumpyGit]

No, that was on the wife's hard disk.

I just reformatted the stick in Windows, and I could then choose between FAT32 or exfat - I chose exfat and now read/write support is back in Dolphin. Maybe the stick format was FAT32? I'll reformat it as FAT32 and try again...

[GrumpyGit]

OK, reformatted the stick in Windows to FAT32 - read-only access in Dolphin Kubuntu 17.10, read-write in Dolphin Kubuntu 14.04!

Looks like it's a FAT32 problem then.

[GrumpyGit]

SOLVED!!

Found the culprit - usbmount was installed, causing a conflict! Removed and now it's working fine again.

Maybe it got installed as part of another app, or I simply installed it myself - I really can't say. Main thing is it's solved .

Thanks for your help and patience.

Regards, Kev .