xfce4. external USB Hard Drive is read only despite my efforts...

[brjoon1021]

I am using Thunar and XFCE4. I started with the minimal install CD, so this is not exactly Xubuntu as I do not have Xubuntu-desktop package installed.

I installed psydm to be able to easily edit and control mounting, fstab etc... Anyways, I can't figure out how to write to this disk. I have amended the Thunar icon to read "gksudo Thunar" as its command. It opens Thunar with whatever elevated rights that would come along with the command. I still can't write to the disk. If I change the permissions for the disk under the properties tab to be "read&write" for the user group, It asks me about something to be done retroactively to files. No matter whether I choose yes or no here, it still does not change the disk to a writable disk.

No love and no ideas. Can you help me write to this disk ? I run as a user called "user" so maybe I should not have made Thunar open as "gksudo" ?

Any help would be good....

B.

[brjoon1021]

Bump. Anybody can help ?

[brjoon1021]

Here is my fstab.

The last line is the device in question

/dev/sdb2 /media/sdb2 vfat defaults 0 0
/dev/sdc2 /media/sdc2 vfat defaults 0 0
/dev/sdd1 /media/sdd1 vfat users,user 0 0

I made some changes to the fstab and it is still only a read-only disk.

/dev/sdd1 /media/sdd1 vfat defaults 0 0

* Is it too much to expect an operating system to be ready to assume an external hard drive might have been added to the system to put something on it ?

[bigwigbaz]

Can you Alt+F2 'gksu thunar' and get write access that way? beware though, it will still be opened as root until you close the window wherever you navigate to, but I assume you are aware of that.

Have you tried adding another USB device before/after? I had all sorts of problems after my secondary internal drive failed, I had to temporarily leave an old 128MB usb drive attached, as sdb1 was inaccessible until I manually modified the fstab. This then forced the next USB to be sdc1 so was ok for read and write access.

Sorry I can't be more helpful.