Re: usb disk insists on being readonly

lalawawa wrote:

Hi, I just bought a 400Mbyte usb disk.

My OS is Ubuntu version 5, I've recently done the updates to it.

My computer is a Sony VAIO PCV-RX270DS that I bought in 2001, with
about 400Mbytes of disk and the usb port is USB 1 (that manual doesn't
say which USB version because I think USB 2.0 wasn't out yet). The
disk is connected through a hub.

The drive is a 400GB Simpletech drive. The specifications make it
clear it's USB 1.1 compatible. All the online technical support
assumes you're on Windows.

When I turn on the disk, it appears in the /media directory by the
filename ' simpletech ' (not spaces before and after the name). The
fstab entry that appears is

/dev/sda /media/usb0 auto rw,user,noauto 0 0

If I cd to /media and do 'ls -ld \ simpletech\ ', I get
dr-x------ 1 wulluw wulluw 4096 2007-02-20 10:25 simpletech
if I go into that directory and do 'ls -la' I get
total 8
dr-x------ 1 wulluw wulluw 4096 2007-02-20 10:25 .
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4096 2007-07-04 14:20 ..
dr-x------ 1 wulluw wulluw 0 2007-02-20 10:25 System Volume
Information
if I try 'touch a' it says
touch: cannot touch `a': Read-only file system
if I try 'sudo touch a' it still says
touch: cannot touch `a': Read-only file system
I cd back to /media
$ chmod +w \ simpletech\ /
chmod: changing permissions of ` simpletech /': Read-only file system
$ sudo chmod +w \ simpletech\ /
chmod: changing permissions of ` simpletech /': Read-only file system

Why is it saying the filesystem is readonly when /etc/fstab clearly
says it's rw? What do I have to do to get the disk mounted rw? A
400GB readonly disk with nothing on it isn't very useful.

Any help would be appreciated.

Bill
My guess: the drive is formatted ntfs and the "auto" in the fstab entry
is causing linux to load the ntfs driver (rather than ntfs-3g). The
drive will be painfully slow at usb 1.1. usb2 pci cards are cheap and
do a great job.
.

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