Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

No write/delete permissions for external USB harddrive

Collapse
This topic is closed.
X
X
Collapse
 
  • Page of 1
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts
Previous template Next
    #1

    No write/delete permissions for external USB harddrive

    Hi there!

    I recently switched to Kubuntu from WinXP which I removed from my system. I attached my external USB hard drive (ntfs) to kubuntu and I could open it. I tried to remove some old files but it won't work! I tried to change the Permissions to Read & Write, but Konqueror states I don't have the necessary permissions.

    I find this very frustrating. Formatting the drive isn't an option because I have important files on it. I tried mounting with sudo, but mount doesn't reconize the drive at all unless I mount it from KDE.

    So how do I give myself permission to write to my external hard drive??

    Thanks in advance for your reply.

    Magnentius
    Tags: None
    • Top
    • Bottom
    #2
    Re: No write/delete permissions for external USB harddrive

    It's not a permission problem - Linux doesn't have (stable) NTFS write support.
    • Top
    • Bottom

    Comment

      #3
      Re: No write/delete permissions for external USB harddrive

      Theoretically you could enable writing on that drive, but as Earthwings pointed out, it might lead to data loss/corruption.

      There is a 'beta' driver for writing to ntfs (search for 'ntfs-3g'), but as it is still in beta you probably shouldn't use it if there is unbacked up critical data on the drive.
      (Of course you shouldn't have critical data that is not backed up in the first place )
      • Top
      • Bottom

      Comment

        #4
        Re: No write/delete permissions for external USB harddrive

        Originally posted by Earthwings
        It's not a permission problem - Linux doesn't have (stable) NTFS write support.
        Could you copy or move files on NTFS drive to a FAT32 drive? I could not do it but figure it was due to lack of knowledge on how to.
        • Top
        • Bottom

        Comment

          #5
          Re: No write/delete permissions for external USB harddrive

          ntfs-3g has been working quite nicely form me for quite a while.
          However, I can't get kubuntu to automatically mount any ntfs drive with ntfs-3g instead of the highly limited ntfs driver.

          For what it's worth:
          http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=10543.0
          • Top
          • Bottom

          Comment

            #6
            Re: No write/delete permissions for external USB harddrive

            The best thing to do is format the hard drive to a fat32 from within Linux and create a mount point after that. gparted will work nicely.
            • Top
            • Bottom

            Comment

              #7
              Re: No write/delete permissions for external USB harddrive

              I tried that. Lost everything. Windows no longer like FAT32, let alone a 250GB FAT32 partition. I had a 70GB internal drive on linux formatted FAT32 for a few weeks until the day windows decided to silently destroy the FAT and pretend the partition never existed. Linux couldn't recover much (with the little I know, granted) but I then switched to ext3 immediately with EXT2IFS in windows. Telling people to "just install this bit of software to access my files" does not bode well for linux advocacy, trust me I tried. I would not recommend FAT32 anymore if you plan on booting between windows and linux often - hard drives are getting too big.

              But I just rambled. Apologies. I meant to say that I'd like ntfs-3g automounting so that I can actually copy files to other peoples' flashdisks - again, having to reboot to windows to access an NTFS flashdisk quickly spawns a remark about windows being able to do everything better, which I don't want to hear.

              • Top
              • Bottom

              Comment

                #8
                Re: No write/delete permissions for external USB harddrive

                Sorry about your files, I hope you backed up those files before attempting anything. This only reason I recommend fat32 is I used to use an NT formated external drive and lost about 250gb of data. I currently have a usb drive 160gb formated to fat32. I had to create a mount point to get it to work correctly but is flawless and works on every pc I plug into. At this point I still use a windows recovery program called handy recovery and it works like a charm. I tried using some linux recovery programs but require a learning curve and have not really had time to go through them to understand how they work.
                • Top
                • Bottom

                Comment

                  #9
                  Re: No write/delete permissions for external USB harddrive

                  Hehe, one bad personal experience is all it takes to make one change ways. Well, with the 1 : ntfs 1 : fat32 score I'd say go with whatever works for you. However, I still wanted a way to handle other people's USB ntfs disks, and found some help across various places and I believe the trick was in pmount.

                  http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...&highlight=fdi
                  On this forum topic, follow the project page link and get the patched pmount. You should be able to get away with this software tool as well (ntfs-config) and it doesn't seem to require a reboot.

                  I also got some info here:
                  http://www.sabayonlinux.org/wiki/ind..._as_read/write
                  But almost nothing in there applies to (k)ubuntu. I only looked at the fdi bit. And our fdi policies ALSO lie here: /etc/hal/fdi/policy/*
                  • Top
                  • Bottom

                  Comment

                  Previous template Next
                  Working...
                  X