RutSum

How To Get The Ownership Of Your Own USB Drive Back (On Linux)

So it happened that I gave away my USB drive to Vishal for a while, because I needed him to give me some of the awesome downloaded stuff that he has on his 250 Gb hard drive. He had a barely working Ubuntu installation on his PC which he was using to survive, because Windows XP had given up on his system after his graphic card died.

Anyway, I told him to remove the junk that has made a permanent place on my USB drive, and wipe it clean before he put in the new stuff. Sadly for me, Vishal is one of those guys who doesn’t use Shift+Delete, but uses Delete and then removes the stuff later on from the trash. A feature of Nautilus is that it doesn’t transfer your trash to the Trash folder, but instead transfers it to a folder called “.Trash-1000″ on the same partition.

Somehow, maybe because he forgot to unmount the drive before he pulled it out, the FAT filesystem on it got corrupted, and I lost control of my own drive. I could see all my old data inside the “.Trash-1000″ folder, but I couldn’t delete it. When I mounted it at my own place, it got mounted as a read-only medium, something like a CD drive. I couldn’t write to it, even as root.

As usual, I barged into the PCLinuxOS support forums. There, first I was told to do an fsck on the drive, which did not work, since it was a FAT filesystem. So I installed dosfstools first.

$ sudo apt-get install dosfstools

I then did a dosfsck on the drive, which returned a long list of errors.

Somebody told me that if I didn’t need the data on the drive, I should nuke it and start afresh. So I formatted the drive with the ext3 filesystem by using -

$ sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1

Well the “.Trash-1000″ folder was apparently gone, but the drive was still getting mounted as read-only for me. This time it was a permissions issue, that is, I could write to it as root, but not as the normal user. To get ownership of the mount point temporarily, I did -

$ sudo chown apoorv /media/disk

But this was not satisfactory as I would have to do this everytime for every new USB drive I mounted. To gain permanent write access, a chmod was necessary.

$ sudo chmod +t /media/

And that was it. Now all USB drives will be mounted in write mode, irrespective of their filesystem.

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