External drives always mounted read-only in Ubuntu


Recommended Posts

When I plug in any USB stick or SD/MMC card, Ubuntu 7.10 mounts it read-only. In the terminal I try to do:

$ sudo mount -o remount,rw /dev/sdb1

mount: block device /dev/sdb1 is write-protected, mounting read-only

In desperation, I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 to see if this fixed it, but the problem remains.

My fstab is the unmodified, original version that came with Ubuntu.

What is going wrong?

Thx

Link to comment
Share on other sites

When I plug in any USB stick or SD/MMC card, Ubuntu 7.10 mounts it read-only. In the terminal I try to do:

$ sudo mount -o remount,rw /dev/sdb1

mount: block device /dev/sdb1 is write-protected, mounting read-only

It turns out that Ubuntu will mount a filesystem read-only when it detects that there had been an unclean removal of the device that hosts the filesystem. Since I had my USB stick plugged in when Ubuntu flaked out, forcing me to reboot, it got branded with the 'unclean' flag.

To reset the flag, I had to plug my USB stick into a Windows system and reboot it, which apparently 'blesses' connected filesystems in some way. Now Ubuntu allows my USB stick to be mounted read-write.

Kind of a pain. I don't remember having to do this before...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.