Ubuntu :: Reformat Read-only NFTS External Drive?
Aug 30, 2010
Short version: How do I reformat an external hard-drive (read-only, NFTS) so that I can rw to it.
Long version: I had a self-built Ubuntu desktop that is now dead. I have pulled out the hard-drives and have bought one of the connector's to convert the SATA cable to USB so I can put the data on my Mac. Unfortunately, my Mac is not able to read the hard-drive for some reason... So, I've decided to boot my old Ubuntu laptop to pull the files from the SATA drive to an external drive then hopefully connect that external drive to transfer the files to the Mac. The external drive is currently formatted as NFTS and I'm unable to reformat it with gparted--I'm guessing that's because it's read-only mode...?
Ubuntu ext3 SATA -> connector -> Mac OS X
or
Ubuntu ext3 SATA -> connector -> Ubuntu ext3 laptop -> external NFTS HD -> Mac OS X
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Jul 3, 2010
Just bought a 'my passport essential' wd external drive. Before putting anything on it I want to get rid of the partition that holds a windows exe for backing up and some security features. Not sure whether its a hidden partition but wondered whether the on-board disk utility could achieve the same as 'f' disc used to.
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Apr 9, 2010
I recently reformatted my external hard drive. Somewhere along the way I think my fstab got messed up because now my hard drive won't mount. Instead I get the following error:
Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 1: helper failed with:
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so
If I mount it through Gparted, it mounts just fine.
My fstab currently looks like this:
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Feb 8, 2011
I was trying to reformat my Seagate external hard drive and I selected "free Space," in disk utility not realizing that the computer would no longer recognize the device. I'm trying to install Snow Leopard on it so now how do I format it now to the GUID format? I luckily backed up the entire contents of the hard drive (The essential files on it), but what do I do now that the computer doesen't recognize it!?
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Jul 4, 2011
Been happily going along with Lucid Lynx, locked in, no problems. Slowly sorting through many files on an external 500 GB USB drive, moving into useful sub-folders. Today, I cannot write to any folders on that drive -- read only. ?!?! I run nautilus as root, still no joy. (Using nautilus GUI to browse files to move to other folders.. how can I change these settings to allow me to be able to write to this drive again?
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Feb 17, 2011
I have a computer with Ubuntu 10.04, with few disk space. For downloading some torrents, I've connected a USB hardrive, ext4 formated. But this idea wasn't a solution, because the drive keeps getting read-only permission... Is there any way of prevent this to happen?
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Aug 21, 2010
I was in the process of backing up data from my hard drive to an external usb drive when the drive suddenly became read only. Does anyone know how I can make it read/write again? I am using Debian Lenny and the drive is ntfs formatted. I have another ntfs formatted usb drive that is not effected in this way.
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Jun 26, 2010
I am using Thunar and XFCE4. I started with the minimal install CD, so this is not exactly Xubuntu as I do not have Xubuntu-desktop package installed. I installed psydm to be able to easily edit and control mounting, fstab etc... Anyways, I can't figure out how to write to this disk. I have amended the Thunar icon to read "gksudo Thunar" as its command. It opens Thunar with whatever elevated rights that would come along with the command. I still can't write to the disk. If I change the permissions for the disk under the properties tab to be "read&write" for the user group, It asks me about something to be done retroactively to files. No matter whether I choose yes or no here, it still does not change the disk to a writable disk.
No love and no ideas. Can you help me write to this disk ? I run as a user called "user" so maybe I should not have made Thunar open as "gksudo" ?
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Jan 22, 2011
so here's my issue and what I think is causing it right now. I have a 1TB external usb hard drive that has worked perfectly, but recently I set it up a mount point for it in fstab so that I could create a SMB share on the drive so I could stream videos and pictures to my TV through my Wii using WiiMC. This now works perfectly, but now the hard drive has been set into read-only mode. When I use sudo to try to chmod the drive or the folders on it, it does nothing. When I right-click on the drive and check the permissions tab, it says the owner is root and all the options are greyed out.
I've read through several posts on similar topics to this, but none of them have been very helpful as they suggest using command line tools that I don't know how to use, so I'm hoping someone here can give me concise, step by step instructions of what to type in, or what settings to change in fstab to solve my little problem so I can start copying stuff back onto my drive. I'm running Ubuntu 10.10 and the filesystem on the external drive is FAT32. Here's some more info you might need:
sudo fdisk -l:
Code:
Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
[Code]...
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Mar 16, 2011
I administer a remote server via SSH that runs CentOS 5.5. I have been unsuccessful in all my attempts to write to two different external USB hard drives with a single ext3 partition when logged in as root.
When attempting to create a "test" directory I get one of two messages:
Quote:
Both drives *appear* to have filesystem issues. When I run an fsck on either drive, I get:
Quote:
Keep in mind this is a newly-formatted, empty drive.
Not putting stock in the odds that I've had two hard drives (different sizes and brands) with the exact same hardware problem, I'm going to assume this is a software issue, although maybe it isn't. Hence, my post in "Linux - General". I've heard talk elsewhere of controller (chipset) issues coming into play. Is this valid?
Okay, here's the information you'll need to make a diagnosis....
Here's the output of a "df -h" command:
Quote:
Here's the contents of my /etc/fstab:
Quote:
Here's the output of "cat /etc/mtab":
Quote:
Here's the output of a mount command:
Quote:
Here's the output of fdisk on the device in question:
Quote:
The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 48641.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024, and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)
Command (m for help):
I've got someone with access to the box if necessary. But it might take days to implement solutions since this isn't his full-time job. Remote solutions are, therefore, preferable.
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Oct 7, 2010
I try
mount -t ntfs -o rw /dev/sdb1 /mnt/exthdd
it doesn't give me any response so I presume it succeeded but when I try to touch it, it tells me it's a read-only file system
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Mar 31, 2010
I am using sun micro system. We have installed fedora in that. I want to know how to give R/W permission to a external hdd...
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Jun 21, 2010
I bought a Western Digital 1TB external hard drive to use with a Gentoo build. It connected beautifully, mounted visibly but despite being mounted read/write any attempt to write to it produced the error "read-only file system". I chased a number of red herrings before I found that the drive comes with an NTFS filesystem and NTFS support in my kernel was set to read-only, which I think was a default setting. Simple fix was to install a different file system - as it was a new drive there was no old data to lose.
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Jul 20, 2009
I am trying to install the reiserfs drivers to read/write to my external drive. But keep getting command not found. Although the system can get man pages for modprobe.
modprobe reiserfs
bash: modprobe: command not found
I also need to know how to add myself to the sudoers file. I have already tried visudo but this has not worked.
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May 22, 2010
I initially thought the problem had to do with the Lucid Lynx upgrade, a lot of people have been reporting similar issues with drive mapping and things along those line. My issue is that an external drive, formatted in FAT32 appears to be corrupted, and overtime begins to read or mounts as 'read-only.'
What I've read, and deduced, is that this is ultimately and issue with the drive. I've backed it up, reformatted, and been able to write to the drive successfully, but I've been moving a lot of files (backing up) and the system has been reporting input/output errors in transferring some files (through the GUI).
The only thing I can think of, is that the device itself is corrupted or damaged, and that I need to be thinking of other back-up options for the future. Any suggestions on disk-doctoring? I'm hoping to do a clean-install of the OS once I back up my files manually.
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Aug 19, 2011
I tried to install ubuntu 11.04 on my external hard drive (WD My Passport, thats all i remember about the name) and all was well, until I tried to reformat it from ext4 to FAT, and no such luck, it isn't even being READ, not in fdisk -l, not by gparted, disk manager, or anything else. Windows is no help at all... I tried that out of desparation.
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Mar 26, 2010
I have an external drive which is formatted for Linux (ext3) and want to re-format it to use it under windows. I have no data on the disk that I need, just want to re-format so I can use it for a backup for my windows7 laptop.
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Aug 21, 2010
I was previously on Windows 7 and then had to get a new hard drive as my old one died on me. As I had a Ubuntu disc lying around, I decided to install it onto this computer, but honestly, I can't stand the OS and can't do anything that I'm used to doing (and doing it slower when in Linux). My question is, how do I completely reformat this hard drive / how do I install WIndows onto this computer, when my BIOS isn't letting me edit it. The Windows disc doesn't try to load, no matter what I try to do to it.
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Jan 17, 2011
I recently bought 320 GB Trancend external hard disk and working fine days back.Earlier i could copy from and to the hard disk with out any issue. I dont know what happened after that now i am not able to write any files in to the external hard disk. This is not NTFS formatted device. here is some of the out put from terminal.
Code:
sundar@sundar-sundar:~$ fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
[code]...
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Oct 31, 2009
I have a 2Gb DT Kingston secure USB stick which somehow I have contrived to partially reformat using Gparted - however it now only shows 15Mb of unallocated space and that's it - I cannot seem to get the full empty 2Gb back again.
Is it because it used to have windows based secure software on it - has it 'locked down' the drive so it's now useless?
I just want to have 2Gb of EXT type space!
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Dec 16, 2010
i borrowed an external hard drive from my friend to back up a load of stuff on my windows partition before reinstalling it. I am doing this through ubuntu. I am trying to zip up folders like My Documents etc and chuck them on the external hard drive but it always comes up with errors to do with read/write permissions. In the permissions tab on the folder properties of the ext hard drive it says I am owner but i have no file access (only folder access is create and delete files). When i try to give myself read/write permission it just goes straight back to nothing when i look at it again.
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Aug 27, 2010
I just gave my friend my laptop which has II on it. She wants W7 (have the disk) but how do I reformat my drive in order to do a clean install?
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Feb 7, 2010
I have a little experience using Ubuntu with VMWare Fusion on my Mac, but that is about it. My girlfriend is running Windows Vista on an HP Pavilion tx 2000 laptop and she has been having all sorts of trouble with it. Needless to say Windows is eating the computer from the inside out so I recommended that she use Ubuntu, which means that I have to set everything up for her... So my question is how do I go about reformatting the entire hard drive and installing Ubuntu (or another Linux based OS recommended)?
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Mar 16, 2011
I am on Ubuntu 10.10.I installed it on a 500 gig hard drive.In the future i want to software RAID(I did it in the past using the alternate version of ubuntu from the installation process), is it possible to add the new hard drive later and RAID later or i need to reformat?I am talking about software RAID.
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Mar 24, 2010
I've had a look at some similar threads but as I'm very new to linux they're already a bit technical for me. Sorry, this calls for someone with patience. I gather from other threads that disconnecting an external drive without unmounting is a no-no, and this seems to be the likely cause. Now the disk is read only and I'm unable to change any settings through the usual control panel on ubuntu. I'm just not familiar with the terminal instructions. I tried to cut and past a few command lines from other threads but I got some warnings that proceding could damage data. Like this one: WARNING! Running e2fsck on a mounted filesystem may cause SEVERE filesystem damage.
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Oct 15, 2009
In trying to get rid of GPT I somehow hosed my flash drive - now when plugged in and I run df - I see tempfs /dev/shm - is there anyway I can somehow repartition, reformat my flash drive ?
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Jul 28, 2010
I have an external hdd I use at work to backup files and transport larger files. When I first formatted it I used FAT32, so these silly computers with fruit on the side of them could also use the drive. I've now come to the conclusion it is best to do away with those fruity computers, and stick with linux (and when needed, windoze).
As such I'd like to "convert" the external hdd from FAT32 to NTFS; that way I can support >4GB files while still retaining windoze comparability. Is it possible to do this without loosing the files currently on the drive, or do I have no option but to re-format?
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May 11, 2011
it will have a 1TB HDD with Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat. I want to reformat the drive and do some kind of advanced partitioning. I want to have 2 installs of Ubuntu11.04, that way I can have Unity AND Gnome 3. Is there a way I can partition it so they share the home and swap partitions? (2. / partitions, 1 /home and 1 swap) How would I do that?
I will also need 2 partitions for Windows 7 which I use for work. (No, I do not want to use VirtualBox) My Windows 7 cd creates a second system reserve partition. I don't know if this will make me run out of partitions. I hear you can only have a max of 4. My idea above has 4 partitions for Ubuntu alone.
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Aug 22, 2010
I installed ubuntu using a flash stick and I must have done it wrong as I cannot get access to the internet (to install more stuff)so I have to start over. I have searched but still don't know how to do it. Do I delete all the ubuntu files on mhy flash stick and then insert it in the drive or do I enter something at the command line?
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Jan 14, 2009
I have 2 ubuntu's: 1 on my ineternal hard drive, 1 on my external
When I startup without my ext drive =>GRUB error 21.
And when I plug it in I can choose: the standard ubuntu kernel is the one on my external, and the original one is listed under other...
I'd like to be able to startup without external hard drive and make the ubuntu on my internal drve the standard.
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