[Solved] USB Drive Mounts as Read-Only

[mikeflan]

When I format an external USB hard drive to EXT4 it mounts in /media/, but is still owned by Root and Read-Only for me. Why does it do that? How can I make it mount as read/write? Yes I researched this. Yes, I can chown to fix it temporarily, but I want it fixed for good.

Code: Select all

$ cat /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=328055c3-8217-4ce4-b13b-1c29631bfbe7 /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
/swapfile                                 none            swap    sw              0       0

LM 19.3 Cinnamon

[LanceM]

Try
Plug it in, when the window opens, right click a blank area and choose open as root. Now right click a blank area and choose properties, then click the permissions tab. Use the dropdowns and select your user name for owner and group

[AndyMH]

When I format an external USB hard drive to EXT4 it mounts in /media/, but is still owned by Root and Read-Only for me.

If you formatted it in gparted, that's what it does.

chowning it should fix it

Code: Select all

sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /media/mike/passport3

[mikeflan]

Excellent. Thanks Lance and Andy. Chown worked, but it was only temporary. Thankfully, Lance's procedure is apparently permanent.

I did format it with gparted. I guess I will use Disks next time. I sure wish gparted would supply an option that defaulted to owned by the user who is running gparted, but then you could select Root if you wanted to. This kind of thing causes a lot of trouble to someone new to Linux, which I am not I guess.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.