[SOLVED] How do I mount my external vfat drive to be rw?

[Fuzzi99]

I'm having trouble mounting my External 1TB Western Digital drive (reformatted to FAT32 when purchased so it would work on my old mac).

I can mount it as read only (even for root! ), but I need to be able to write to it as my internal HDD is only 40GB and it has no room left .

[Elisa]

E.g. by adding this line in /etc/fstab:

/dev/sdc1 /home/_you_/_external auto rw,user,auto 0 0

=> you can edit it by CLI command:
sudo nano /etc/fstab

where:
sdc1 is your disk (you must check what's your disk position like, it can be e.g. sdd1 or sdb1...)
_you_ is your account in home folder
_external is your folder which you have to create in your /home/_you_/ so your disk will be always mounted there, just pointing to that folder

other details, google for fstab manual by google

and finally in CLI slap:

sudo mount /dev/sdc1 /home/_you_/_external
this will mount the disk to the (already by you formerly created) folder _external and the fstab line will make your disk mounted always after boot your comp.


http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Fstab
or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fstab
or
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/mount-unmount.html

If you don't know your disk position, use command

sudo fdisk -l

or gparted app from your repo

[Fuzzi99]

Thanks for that, It managed to get it to mount but I still can't write to it (even in root)

(btw it's /dev/sdb1)

[EDIT: added root]

[Elisa]

BTW what is the disk like?
Is it a SSD ? Isn't it protected by its switch (like I have such one on my SSD card )

Or what errors it says ? If you cannot read any errors, try e.g. to copy something to your mounted disk in CLI:

cp ~/something.txt ~/_external/

so your file will be copied to the disk by the same file name. Just check it there if it did Supposing something.txt is a file in your home (~/ means /home/_your_account_/) and _external is your disk mounted in that folder.

Paste here the error which will appear.

P.S. After failed you can even try it by preceding sudo but it should work without it too.

[Fuzzi99]

It gives this error in plain xterm and su/sudo xterm

cp: cannot create regular file `./external/logclock': Read-only file system

[Elisa]

So, now, it's mounted as ro therefore try to unmount the disk by:

umount /home/_your_account_/_external

and then try to mount it as mentioned before (maybe sudo preceding will be needed) so it'll be mounted again but with rw access. It should help.

BTW, after all that above, paste here what u see by CLI command:

cat /etc/mtab

[Fuzzi99]

It's still read only this is what comes up, (I'm in root terminal is that a bad thing?0

cp: cannot create regular file `./external/logclock': Read-only file system
josiah-HP-Compaq josiah # cat /etc/mtab
/dev/sda1 / reiserfs rw,notail,user_xattr 0 0
proc /proc proc rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0
none /sys sysfs rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0
fusectl /sys/fs/fuse/connections fusectl rw 0 0
none /sys/kernel/debug debugfs rw 0 0
none /sys/kernel/security securityfs rw 0 0
none /dev devtmpfs rw,mode=0755 0 0
none /dev/pts devpts rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=0620 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs rw,nosuid,nodev 0 0
none /var/run tmpfs rw,nosuid,mode=0755 0 0
none /var/lock tmpfs rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0
binfmt_misc /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc binfmt_misc rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0
gvfs-fuse-daemon /home/josiah/.gvfs fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon rw,nosuid,nodev,user=josiah 0 0
/dev/sdb1 /home/josiah/external vfat rw 0 0

[Elisa]

I see sb1 is rw
BTW do not use root terminal.
Rather regular user with sudo (kdesudo or gksudo). Root term is for skilled ones or for special purposes only

Try that cp copying in not-root terminal. As your disk is rw, it should work...

[Fuzzi99]

This is what I get in regular terminal

josiah@josiah-HP-Compaq ~ $ cp ./logclock ./external/
cp: cannot create regular file `./external/logclock': Read-only file system
josiah@josiah-HP-Compaq ~ $ cat /etc/mtab
/dev/sda1 / reiserfs rw,notail,user_xattr 0 0
proc /proc proc rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0
none /sys sysfs rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0
fusectl /sys/fs/fuse/connections fusectl rw 0 0
none /sys/kernel/debug debugfs rw 0 0
none /sys/kernel/security securityfs rw 0 0
none /dev devtmpfs rw,mode=0755 0 0
none /dev/pts devpts rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=0620 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs rw,nosuid,nodev 0 0
none /var/run tmpfs rw,nosuid,mode=0755 0 0
none /var/lock tmpfs rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0
binfmt_misc /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc binfmt_misc rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0
gvfs-fuse-daemon /home/josiah/.gvfs fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon rw,nosuid,nodev,user=josiah 0 0
/dev/sdb1 /home/josiah/external vfat rw 0 0

and for sudo I get

josiah@josiah-HP-Compaq ~ $ sudo cp ./logclock ./external/
[sudo] password for josiah:
cp: cannot create regular file `./external/logclock': Read-only file system

[Elisa]

Did you unmounted the sdb1 disk by
umount
command?
And how exactly did you again mounted it?
Type here all those commands.

[Fuzzi99]

I unmounted by:

Code: Select all

sudo umount

and remounted by:

Code: Select all

sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /home/josiah/external

[EDIT: spelling]

[Elisa]

But IMHO umount is not enough

you must umount <device>

so it should be

umount /home/_you_/external

hen try to mount it again and check the mtab if the disk rw
If so, maybe your disk needs to be checked by gparted or in widnow$ by chkdsk due fat table problems/errors

as someone writes here http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.p ... 56070.html

September 10th, 2010, 05:14 PM
ok, I solved my problem. I hadn't found anything that worked with linux, but I ran the chkdsk utility via the windows command line to fix it and it succeeded (though it took *forever*). I don't like to admit that I was able to do something in windows that I couldn't on linux, but it's sort of because windows ****ed up it's own file system in the first place, so whatever.

[Elisa]

After mounting you could try to check the disk for any errors also by this:

sudo fsck.vfat -yv /dev/sdb1

[Fuzzi99]

Gparted is checking now.

It's for some reason growing the file system to fill the partition as well as checking it!?

[Fuzzi99]

Getting Gparted to check fixed it,
Thanks

but I have to use sudo to copy to it.

[Elisa]

If you make correct fstab line, as I mentioned above, next after reboot, you should access without sudo by your file manager (dolphin or nautilus, thunar etc.), so no sudo will be needed
All depends on switches in the fstab line, learn up the fstab manual to know what's goin' on