USB thumb drives mount as read only

[darren33]

I'm having a lot of trouble with USB thumb drives mounting as read only, or at least I get a "read only" error message when trying to write to them. The strange thing is that when I look at permissions, my user is listed as the owner with read/write access, but my group is listed as "read only". Dropping down to a terminal and using sudo to perform a copy to the drive works perfectly.

Anyway, this isn't isolated to just one or two drives but to every thumb drive I try to access from my system. It's frustrating because this is one of those things that should "just work". Is there a universal solution?

Thanks.

[yancek]

What's on the thumb drives and what is the filesystem type? If you are putting Live CDs on the thumb drive, that is expectd behavior as they are read-only filesystems.

[sudodus]

If you are auto-mounting the drives, they probably mount at /media/$USER/label, where $USER is your user ID and label is the actual label of the pendrive (if there is a label. otherwise it is probably the UUID string).

Try if changing the ownership and permissions of the directory /media/$USER helps.


sudo chown $USER /media/$USER
sudo chmod u+rwx /media/$USER

Unmount or eject the pendrive, unplug it and plug it back in!

Can you write to it now?

-o-

If not, I will ask you to run some terminal window commands and post the results.

[darren33]

Well oddly enough, the problem seems to have sorted itself out. :confused:

I have no idea what changed, but I just plugged in some drives to test, and they're working perfectly. Might it have something to do with the fact that I started using PCManFM as my file manager instead of Thunar?

[sudodus]

I'm glad that it works now :-)

I don't think, that the choice of file browser would make a difference. Maybe rebooting the computer would make a difference?