Re: Absolutely cannot write to USB drive

[John Schmidt <john.andrew.schmidt@gmail.com>]

On Tuesday 08 January 2008, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> I have a 2GB Sandisk Cruzer USB drive that I removed the U3 garbage
> from. I formatted the disk as FAT in a friend's WindowsXP machine.
> Now, any Windows machine can read and write to the disk, and my Fedora
> desktop can read and write to it as a regular user. However, my Ubuntu
> Feisty 7.04 laptop can only write as root.
>
> I have this is my fstab (yes, it is the correct device):
> /dev/sdb1 /media/usb auto rw,users,noauto 0 0
>
> However, HAL does not auto mount so I must manually mount it:
> feisty@feisty-laptop:~$ mount -o rw /dev/sdb1 /media/usb/
> mount: only root can do that
> feisty@feisty-laptop:~$ sudo mount -o rw /dev/sdb1 /media/usb/
> feisty@feisty-laptop:~$ sudo chown feisty /media/usb/
> chown: changing ownership of `/media/usb/': Operation not permitted
>
> As you can see, despite the "users" option in fstab, only root can
> mount. And even then, I cannot change the user. What is to be done?
> Ideally, HAL would automount this device such that users could write
> to it.
>

What are your groups that you belong to?  You might have to add yourself to 
the plugdev group.  

Here are my groups and I can do the usb drive thing:

dialout cdrom floppy audio video plugdev fuse powerdev

John