DJ Bless One

Hey guys, Ive been using Knoppix for quite some time now. I recently bought an 80 gig Comstar USB 2.0 Mobile Hard Drive.

I am familiar with mounting it, and setting its writing capabililties, but for some reason, whenever I try and transfer files over, it randomly causes an error half way through, and the device changes itself from writable to read-only without me doing anything. Is it mounted properly?

This is what I do:
1) mkdir /mnt/media
2) mount -rw /dev/sda1 /mnt/media

But it reverts back to read only half way through the transfer process!? I can get some files to transfer, but alot don't. Any ideas?

Tiberious726

try reformating the hard drive; if it is using FAT32 (which i assume is the default that it was formated as at the factory) then the file system could very well have become corrupted (reformat is as fat32 if you want to use it with windows)

DJ Bless One

Yes both my Hard drive and Removable Media Storage is FAT32. I can't reformat the hard drive yet because the whole reason why I need to transfer files is to save some necessary stuff I want BEFORE i reformat.

Edit: I think what I'm trying to do is to make myself run in owner, not just in the shell by typing SU, but in the entire operating system. I think that is causing my permission problems.

Tiberious726

i dont see how that would help but if you want to run the whole thing as root just type root in at the logon prompt then your root password

and by format your hard drive i ment the removable one

DJ Bless One

Where is this log in prompt? I'm running in knoppix, it doesn't not ask you to log in.

But I followed your advice and reformatted my external hard drive. Currently, I am transfering files over. I'm just crossing my fingers hoping it does not cause any errors

Tiberious726

oh, well in distros that dont offer a login prompt you can press CONTROL+ALT+F1 then log in as root then type startx -- :1 to get a gui where you are root; then press CONTROL+ALT+F7 to get back to your origanal desktop (the non-root one)

DJ Bless One

Cool thanks. I'll try that out.

After playing around with it, I relized what had happened. I unplugged the harddrive without unmounting it, and I caused to the partitions to be currupt. That is why it kept changing from read-only to writable and viceversa without me doing anything.

What I suggest is if something similar happens to you, simply reformat the hard drive and mount and unmount properly to ensure no problems arise.

To reformat, this worked for me: mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/sda1