Changing ownership of read-only file system

Question

I did read the several posts available here on "changing ownership of read-only file systems" but they don't seem to help me.

My external hard drive (which I had previously formatted in OS X and used on it for over a year) doesn't allow me to copy anything from/on to it FROM my Ubuntu 11.10

It says that the file system is read only when I try this:

sudo chown -R my-user-name /"Untitled 1"

Where "Untitled 1" is the name of the external hdd.

Any suggestions?

Even getting into nautilius with sudo nautilius to change the ownership didn't work.

(on a side note, what is nautilius anyway? I know I can google THAT)

What should I do now?

Solution 1

Ok, so after a lot of looking around and conferring with my friends, this is what worked for me.

My external hard drive has a journaled file system (hfs+). I don't quite care what that means but I had to "disable journaling".

For this I had to connect my hdd to my macbook and run the following command in it's terminal

sudo /usr/sbin/diskutil disableJournal /Volumes/name-of-my-external-hdd

That worked and my hdd is now read AND write enabled!!

Hope this helps someone in the future! :)

Solution 2

Remount the partition (or disc) but this time with rw (read, write) settings. Should be something like this:

sudo mount -o rw,remount /"Untitled 1"

Solution 3

Usually the cause of the fs being mounted read only is because there are errors. You can run dmesg in a terminal and see if there are any errors reported, and you should check the filesystem with the disk utility.

Comments

[Amanda]

Nautilus is the default file manager in Ubuntu.

[dearN]

All that in the same line? I am a completely new person to Ubuntu. Because ubuntu says that there is no command such as remount.

[Mykroft]

You could also try typing: sudo umount /"Untitled 1" pressing enter then typing sudo mount -o rw /"Untitled 1" and pressing enter which should have the same affect described here.

[dearN]

@Mykroft I tried what you said but my terminal said mount: can't find Untitled 1 in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab :( This is ridiculous! I am beginning to hate ubuntu.

[Mykroft]

And when you typed the above command all on one line it said no such command as remount?

[Rinzwind]

DNA so add the disc to your /etc/fstab. Remember: Linux/Ubuntu is NOT difficult. It's only different. You learn and it becomes normal to you.

[dearN]

@Rinzwind Thanks for the encouragement. You are right, nothing is difficult only I am resistant to change. But anyway, if I may ask.... how do I add a disk to fstab? Isn't that creating a new partition? I don't want to mess with my file system too much as I've already deleted my .bashrc and mucked up my crontab file!!!

[Mykroft]

fstab is just a file that describes what discs to mount where it doesn't actually create anything. In any case you could try: mount -o remount,rw /"Untitled 1" the arguments may just have been in the wrong order. You'll need to remove and reinsert the usb drive first though so that it's mounted.

[dearN]

Sorry but I don't quite understand the language in fstab now. Its alright if no ones wants to answer this question. I'll figure it out eventually.

[mac]

It works, but this fix is not recommended. Check this askubuntu.com/questions/16811/…