gutsy incorrectly recognizes an external USB harddrive as "read only"

[Suchawato]

Hi.

After installing Gutsy,
My 5'th Gen iPod video will not mount at all.
And, I am having a problem with my LaCie external Hard Drive.
At first, I could not read or write to it as Gutsy annoyingly made it a Root only permission by default. This was really irritating, but not unfixable.
Then, after I changed the permissions so that all users could read/write/delete/change files, it seemed to work fine.
Then, the other day when I tried to copy my school assignment to the school folder on my LaCie, it (Gutsy) would not let me. "Access Denied; you don't have permissions to write to this folder". When I used
Code:

gksudo nautilus

to try to re-change the permissions as Root, I got; "The Owner Could Not Be Changed; Couldn't change the owner of "LaCie" because it is on a read-only disk".
There is no switch or button on the LaCie, that makes it "read only".
It's a USB external drive. There would be no point in making it "read only"
It Isn't read only.
I don't care what Gutsy thinks.
I can access it fine on the Macs at school.
So at the moment, I am unable to use it on this computer.

[Louis-Xavier Brusset (lxbrusset)]

Just to indicate that I got strictly the same problem with an external USB Disk (a Western digital external USB disk)
It is a recent bug for me.

"ro" option seems is displayed by properties window.

[Suchawato (anavi)]

I seemed to find a cause and woraround.

What happended was, when I unplugged it from the Mac's at school without properly unmounting it, it would not mount at home, and was being read as "read only".
when I returned to school and plugged it back in to any Mac, and *then* properly unmounted it like I should have in the first place, Upon returning home the drive mounted and read correctly in Gutsy, Including write access.

It is important to note that Mac OS X will mount and write to the drive regardless of wether or not I unmounted it correctly the last time. It will always mount it correctly the next time.

So the drives mounting correctly in Gutsy are seemingly dependant on whether or not someone unmounts a volume correctly in another OS. At least OS X.

This update only effects the LaCie external drive. The LaCie drive is a Mac formatted HFS+ drive.

The Fat 32 formatted iPod seems to be a different bug at least that's my guess.

Fat 32 drives do not mount in my computer at all regardless of being (read only) or not. Unmounting my iPod correctly in Windows or OS X has no effect on whether or not it mounts correctly in Gutsy It doesn't mount at all, and neither do any other USB Fat 32 formatted drives such as my roomate's USB flash stick.

[exactt (giesbert)]

I have the same problem here on 2 computers with 2 different external hard drives. but there is no Mac involved and i umounted the hard drive properly.

@Louis-Xavier Brusset: have you solved the issue?

[Suchawato (anavi)]

I have actually run across this issue with partitions of other Os's as
well.Normally,
Ubuntu will automatically detect my windows partition, however if I were to
turn off the power to the computer without shutting it down using the
windows shutdown sequence, the Windows partition, if not shut down
correctly will not show up on the desktop if I boot into Ubuntu.
Seems to be a mounting problem.
So everything works fine as long as everything is unmounted or shutdown
properly.
If not, Ubuntu doesn't mount it.

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 5:34 AM, exactt <email address hidden> wrote:

> I have the same problem here on 2 computers with 2 different external
> hard drives. but there is no Mac involved and i umounted the hard drive
> properly.
>
> @Louis-Xavier Brusset: have you solved the issue?
>
> --
> gutsy incorrectly recognizes an external USB harddrive as "read only"
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/159711
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>