How do I mount an external USB drive and get write access?

[dperson]

When I plug in an external usb hardrive, kubuntu handles it nicely. An icon appears on the desktop and I can see all the files just fine. However, usb drives always seem to get mounted read-only. I attempted to change the permissions on the drive and/or the folders but this never works. So, basically, I can't write any files to a usb drive. This is really frustrating.

[marshallbanana]

Re: How do I mount an external USB drive and get write access?

When the usb is plugged in, run command (alt-F2) 'kdesu konqueror', this will launch konqueror as the root user. Now navigate to the usb drive, right-click on it and go into properties. Now go to the permissions tab, near the bottom it will list the owner of the device (will be root by default), change the owner to your username (change group to your username too). Now close the properties, and konqueror.
Should now be solved. Don't think you need to restart but may be worthwhile anyway.

[dperson]

Re: How do I mount an external USB drive and get write access?

I tried exactly that and it made no difference. When I tried to copy a file to the usb drive after making this change, it told me I did not have permission.

[dperson]

Re: How do I mount an external USB drive and get write access?

I mean this SEEMS like an important topic. No one has any idea how to get a usb drive to mount other than read-only?

[XstatyK]

Re: How do I mount an external USB drive and get write access?

Actually there are ways to do it. You didn't say what kind of file system it is using but I'm guessing the usb drive has a NTFS file system.

This article might help you but instead of it being /dev/hda it will be /dev/sda1 since your usb drive will be using that type of name. If you plug in a second usb drive it will be /dev/sdb1 and so on and so on. Anyway the article is found here
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/mountwindows

Also you could install ntfs-3g by doing the following in a terminal

sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g

This will allow you to have full write support for a NTFS drive
You can read about it here http://www.ntfs-3g.org/

Hope this helps you going in the right direction.

[penguin.ch]

Re: How do I mount an external USB drive and get write access?

I mean this SEEMS like an important topic.

Sure it is - but, due to the fact that is has already been dicussed a dozen times, as you would have realized by doing some preliminary (re-)search on your own (...), folks like me tend to ignore such a factually redundant thread (in favour of more inventive problems ...).

Birdy aka littleDrHouse