Read-only disk

I'm trying to back up files to an external hard disk via USB, however I cannot write to it (it isn't an option). I can't change the permissions from Properties, and I've tried formatting the drive as ext2, ext3, and FAT32, as it was originally NTFS from use with XP. Can someone lend me hand?

EDIT: the device node is /dev/sda1 and it is mounted as /media/40GB_USB.

 

Go to a terminal and type:

Code:

gksu nautlius

and enter your password. This will open Nautilus (the Gnome file manager) up as root, giving you root access to all files and folders/directories that the computer can actively see. Alternatively, if you're using KDE, you can type:

Code:

sudo konquerer

which should do the same thing for Konquerer (KDE's file manager). You should be able to r/w to the disk then. Most likely you'll need to change permissions of the directory though.

 

Thanks for the fix! How do I change the permissions for good?

 

You're using Kubuntu right? If so, I can't exactly remember how to do it. Maybe Pita can help you more the next time he's online. If you right click on the drive, and then go to properties, you should see a permissions tab. From there just edit the permissions to allow your user (you) to access the drive. I could be wrong about that though.

 

How are you mounting it? If it's automatically mounting as a USB disk under Ubuntu, it should give you permission just by your user being in the 'disk' group. Why is it called 40GB_USB? If you manually created the mount point and such, you will need to put the correct permissions in either /etc/fstab or in the command line when you mount it.

I am assuming you're using ubuntu... if not, tell me a bit more about your system

 

Yeah, it sounds like the drive was mounted by hand. If so, allow the OS to mount it automatically. This will usually mount to a /media/disk directory, which will be allowed in your permissions by default as Pita said (you should be required to enter your password among automatic mount though).

 

I'm using Kubuntu 6.10. The disk was mounted automatically under the /media directory, and I named the disk '40GB_USB' when I formatted it with the FAT32 file system using Qtparted. Using Notebook_ftw's suggestion I opened the disk using Konqueror as root and changed the permissions to my user name and group. Everything seems to be working now except for one thing: I'm transferring 10.3GB of data to this USB disk and after an hour and a half it is still only 18% complete. Why is it so slow? Can I fix this?

Basically I'm backing up my data from Linux onto this disk because I'm going to try to upgrade to Kubuntu 7.04, but I wanted to change the file system of the disk to something more suitable than NTFS (back when XP was my main OS). I thought FAT32 would work, but the rate of transfer hovers between "stalled" and half a MB per second.

 

FAT32 will not work. FAT32 does not support moving files or clusters greater than 4GB, so if you're trying to transfer 10.3GB of data, then you'll need to pick a different filesystem to format it to. I would suggest ext3 if you're just going to be transferring the files from one Linux install to the other. Alternatively, you can just break up the data into smaller folders and transfer them that way.

 

Sorry, it's not actually FAT32. It's ext3. My mistake.