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dearN
Asked: 2012-01-26 11:57:38 +0800 CST

Changing ownership of read-only file system

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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?

11.10

3 Answers

  1. 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"

    • 7
  2. Best Answer

    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! :)

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  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.

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