[SOLVED] eSATA drive is read only under linux mint 8

[ChrisD]

For whatever reason I cannot do anything but read files off of my 2tb eSATA drive, how do I correct this? I do not have this issue under Windows

[ChrisD]

BTW I cannot just change the permissions settings in properties

[deleted]

What's the format of your drive? Is it internal or external? You didn't give us a lot of information to go on.
-Hinto

[ChrisD]

the formatted in FAT32 and its an eSATA drive so its an external although Linux probably dose not recognize it any different that a regular SATA drive.

[deleted]

It all depends on what you have loaded in your linux.

But the gist is the mount that is executing (I assume it's nautilus) doesn't contain the permission that you need to access the drive.
It's a samba thing... You can unmount it and mount it from the command line if you want.
Here's a link http://www.tuxradar.com/answers/466
You shouldn't have to change the permissions on the disc, however, you do have to tell samba who you are. I'm sure there's a "default" setting somewhere to get nautilus to mount with the correct uid and umask. I just can't put my hands on it yet.
-Hinto

[ChrisD]

its not a USB drive and its not mounting as root ether, if I try setting ownership it dose not work, I do not know how to do that outher stuff.

I am using default mint 8.

[deleted]

OK....
So it's am internal drive... The mounting is in fstab. (/etc/fstab) There you'll find the settings for it.
a quick search shows something like adding:

/dev/ada6 /stuff vfat noauto,user,umask=0 0 0

to fstab will mount the fat32 disk with "normal" permissions.

sda6 would need to be replaced by the partition that is fat32
/stuff would need to be replaced by the name you want to call it

but the key is
vfat - handles fat32 or fat
noauto -mount as user (not at boot)
user/umask permissions to mount the disk with

http://www.computing.net/answers/linux/ ... 15098.html


You can experiment with the settings.
-Hinto

[Biker]

Question.. Why on earth did you format a 2 TB drive as fat32? Talk about massive amounts of wasted space!

[deleted]

Agreed... If you are going to share between windows and linux, it should be ntfs. (Mac would be a different story)
-Hinto

[ChrisD]

I am away from the disk at the moment but to answer your questions its an external drive but it is not USB its eSATA like I keep saying (that stands for external SATA, its bacically a SATA port on the outside of your computer sept the connectors are different wikipedia link) and I use FAT 32 because its primarily used on a media player device that dose not support NTFS.

[Biker]

Ewwwww. Formating in FAT32 wastes a TON of space. In other words, when you save a 2K file to the drive, it will take up 32K of space. Not to mention there's a hard file size limit of 4GB. I'd be actively searching for a better multimedia device.

[deleted]

Which also implies you have a bunch of partitions for your 2 TB drive.
-H

[ChrisD]

Nope just one partition, and I generally only have large files on the drive so not that that much space is wasted and I do not need to have any files over 4gb in size on the drive for the purpose I use it for so it suites me well enough.

[altair4]

Stick the drive in a port and post the output of the following commands please:

sudo blkid -c /dev/null
mount

I assume when you stick the drive into its port it automounts and launches Nautilus?

[ChrisD]

I ran a Chkdsk under windows and it is now preforming correctly under linux, I guess there was a problem with the disk that is all better now.