USB Harddrive gets mounted read-only

[gletscher]

Hi I just formated a 10GB drive as a logical ext3 part, it's an IDE drive and I connected it with an IDE2USB controller to my computer. The little plasma-pluggable devices thingy pops open and I click on it to view the empty drive in dolphin ... as read only. Doesn't seem to make much sense, how am I supposed to backup files to an external USB drive if it's mounted readonly? Ok maybe with some crazy cli magic I could mount it manually, but maybe I would just have to type in the root password for the mounting operation from the plasma starter, like I have to do when I click on my internal fat or ntfs drives in dolphin?

kdesu dolphin leaves a dolphin that doesn't work at all, kdesu konqueror works to write my backup files for now..

Am I missing something? Can I mount that USB drive the easy way?

Greetings, Gletscher

[doctordruidphd]

Re: USB Harddrive gets mounted read-only

Hello,
In order to write to an ext3 file system, you have to own it, or have permission to write to it. If you created the system with gparted or something like it, it is probably owned by root, and therefore by default you, as a user, can't write to it..
There are several options to make this work. One way of doing it is to set up a directory on the usb device. cd into your usb device, then:

sudo mkdir backup
sudo chown -R yourusername:yourusername backup

Then, when you plug int he device, you should be able to read and write to the backup directory just fine.
There are other options. One is to create an /etc/fstab entry for the device, based on it's uuid, and specify uid=yourusername in the mount options. Yet another option is to create a permanent mount point for the device in fstab and /media, and change the permissions of the directory in /media so anyone can read/write to it.

[gletscher]

Re: USB Harddrive gets mounted read-only

hey thanks alot for your help, but I don't like fiddle around with fstab for drives that I barely plugin (I reinstall linux more often than I plugin the backup drive) so even the folder option might not work for after a reinstall I might be a different user?

can't i just set the permission so any user can write to ext3? Or shall I just use a different file system? fat is not an option due to the 4GB filesize limit, ntfs? help me god, what about ext4?


Greetings, Gletscher

[doctordruidphd]

Re: USB Harddrive gets mounted read-only

can't i just set the permission so any user can write to ext3?

Sure.
Plug in your device.
cd /media/whatever-your-device-is-mounted-as
sudo mkdir backup
sudo chmod -R a+wr backup

Now when you plug in your device, you can read and write to the backup directory.

[gletscher]

Re: USB Harddrive gets mounted read-only

hey thanks alot, for some reason I feel that folder version isn't a very clean solution, but if it works it's a nice workaround, will stick to it :-)



Thank you all again for the fast help!!