Ubuntu - What if I can't write to my USB device?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Spanky Da Measekite
  • Start date Start date
S

Spanky Da Measekite

In Windows XP and Vista, USB devices just work. They show up and you can
write to them right away. In Ubuntu follow along and see if you can figure
out all the cryptic line commands. No wonder why Ubuntu is still a piece of
crap. NOBODY wants it. It's FREE and still NOBODY wants it.




I Can Read My USB Storage Device, but I Can't Write to It
If you are having trouble writing to a USB key or external USB hard drive,
there are a number of possible causes of the problem.

The first and most simple to diagnose is that you may not have permission to
write to the device. When you plug in the drive, right-click the icon that
appears on your desktop, and select Properties. In the window that appears,
click the Permissions tab and ensure that the Others line has the Write
checkbox selected. If this is not selected, you don't have permission to
access the drive.

Quick Tip

If you do have sufficient permissions but still can't write to the drive,
jump to the Filesystem Fun section below.

To change these permissions, fire up a terminal, and move to the /media
folder:

foo@bar:~$ cd /media
Now take a look at which drives are in there:

foo@bar:~$ ls -al
In the output that appears you should see "usbdisk" as one of the entries.
Now change the permissions so everyone can access it:

foo@bar:~$ sudo chmod a+w usbdisk
You should now be able to access the disk.
 
Spanky said:
In Windows XP and Vista, USB devices just work. They show up and you can
write to them right away. In Ubuntu follow along and see if you can figure
out all the cryptic line commands. No wonder why Ubuntu is still a piece of
crap. NOBODY wants it. It's FREE and still NOBODY wants it.




I Can Read My USB Storage Device, but I Can't Write to It
If you are having trouble writing to a USB key or external USB hard drive,
there are a number of possible causes of the problem.

The first and most simple to diagnose is that you may not have permission to
write to the device. When you plug in the drive, right-click the icon that
appears on your desktop, and select Properties. In the window that appears,
click the Permissions tab and ensure that the Others line has the Write
checkbox selected. If this is not selected, you don't have permission to
access the drive.

Quick Tip

If you do have sufficient permissions but still can't write to the drive,
jump to the Filesystem Fun section below.

To change these permissions, fire up a terminal, and move to the /media
folder:

foo@bar:~$ cd /media
Now take a look at which drives are in there:

foo@bar:~$ ls -al
In the output that appears you should see "usbdisk" as one of the entries.
Now change the permissions so everyone can access it:

foo@bar:~$ sudo chmod a+w usbdisk
You should now be able to access the disk.
Click to expand...

And when was this originally written? All my USB storage devices can be
written to out of the box. Why are you posting this outdated crap? Oh,
yeah, you're desperate to post something -- anything -- to try and
discredit Ubuntu, which, of course, only discredits you.

Alias
 
And when was this originally written? All my USB storage devices can
be written to out of the box. Why are you posting this outdated crap?
Oh, yeah, you're desperate to post something -- anything -- to try and
discredit Ubuntu, which, of course, only discredits you.

Alias
Click to expand...

And of course, when you read these 'problems' and then see the solutions,
you would see that even using a CLI isn't hard......except for the Nymshifting
Frankfurter Wannabee that is.
 
DanS said:
And of course, when you read these 'problems' and then see the solutions,
you would see that even using a CLI isn't hard......except for the Nymshifting
Frankfurter Wannabee that is.
Click to expand...

But of course the info was wrong.

It failed to take into account that maybe the fstab was mounting the
drive in a place other than /media and fstab itself had options to
enable writing to that device.
 
But of course the info was wrong.

It failed to take into account that maybe the fstab was mounting the
drive in a place other than /media and fstab itself had options to
enable writing to that device.
Click to expand...

That doesn't make the info wrong.

/Media is the default location, and would a new user have been saavy
enough to change the mounting location ? I don't think so.
 
DanS said:
That doesn't make the info wrong.

/Media is the default location, and would a new user have been saavy
enough to change the mounting location ? I don't think so.
Click to expand...

Acknowledge that I was right about the fstab though. It's not as
straightfoward as all that.
 
Hadron said:
Acknowledge that I was right about the fstab though. It's not as
straightfoward as all that.
Click to expand...

You were not even remotely right with fstab
Hint: fstab has NADA to do with hot-plugable devices

But then, you don't run linux. You just pretend to do so
 
Back
Top