External Hard Drive Permission

[jmadero]

I'm trying to change my external hard drive permissions so that I can write to it as well, every time I try chmod (or going through nautilus) it gives me the error of "read-only system file". Any ideas on how to change this? I'm a newbie still so I'll probably need detailed instructions if it requires using the text editors or what not. Thanks



jmadero

[leomburke]

check your /etc/fstab line that mounts the external drive (possibly /dev/sd?) and ensure that it does not include 'ro' in the "options" column (the 4th column) - if it does unmount the drive, remove the 'ro' and then remount and you should be able to add write access using chmod as you have been.

[devils casper]

I'm trying to change my external hard drive permissions so that I can write to it as well, every time I try chmod (or going through nautilus) it gives me the error of "read-only system file". Any ideas on how to change this? I'm a newbie still so I'll probably need detailed instructions if it requires using the text editors or what not.

Most Linux Distros do not support NTFS write access out of box. Chmod works for Linux native FileSystems only.

Post the output of fdisk -l command and contents of /etc/fstab file here.

[Cabhan]

leomburke is correct. In fact, your best bet is to use the mount option 'rw' (read/write), even if 'ro' (readonly) isn't there.

[devils casper]

eomburke is correct. In fact, your best bet is to use the mount option 'rw' (read/write), even if 'ro' (readonly) isn't there.

But if External Hard Disk has NTFS filesystem, rw wont make any difference.
Setting rw to Partitions having Linux based FIlesystem will enable write access to root user only.
One has to take ownership of mount_point to have read/write access of Linux based FileSystems.

[jmadero]

I am fairly sure it's not NTFS. I don't have access to the drive until I get home tonight but I am fairly sure I purposely formatted it as FAT. I'll try the suggestions here....I'm not sure why I would have to unmount it, I have never manually mounted it in this distro, I used to have to in FC3 but now it's basically just plug and play....is it a default to have it as ro?

jmadero

[devils casper]

If External Disk has FAT FileSystem then it will default to rw because Fedora support FAT read/write access out of box.
Check the output of fdisk -l command.

[jmadero]

I checked the hard drive in windows and it was NTFS....I had to do some crazy stuff to partition it, move all the stuff (almost 100 gigs) to the FAT32 partition, then I deleted the first partition and resized the FAT32 partition....the only problem is it wouldn't allow me to make it more than 195 gigs or so, so I have 55 gigs being wasted....but good news is that I can delete and modify files on the drive now and all of my files were saved (at one point I thought I had lost about 10 gigs of music). Thanks all


jmadero