6

After reinstalling Ubuntu 12.04 I am facing a strange problem. Anytime I plug in a flash key, Kindle etc., I can see it, but can't write. Owner of the device on say /media/usb0 is root.

When I try to write as root, eg. sudo cp or via root privileged file manager, it works, but is extremly slow.

What could cause such thing?

EDIT: my /etc/fstab

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    nodev,noexec,nosuid 0       0
# / was on /dev/sda2 during installation
UUID=595815c2-d882-4ec8-a2cd-cce70471167c /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
# /boot was on /dev/sda6 during installation
#UUID=1340a336-66ca-4743-a6e4-41a307af2dda /boot           ext4    defaults        0       3
# swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=afa49f1d-d505-4166-82a2-2f44548a48c6 none            swap    sw              0       0

UUID=deb86039-528a-45f3-b5f9-ce528740c94e /data_hdd ext4    defaults    0   2
Jorge Castro
  • 70,934
  • 124
  • 466
  • 653
mreq
  • 4,752
  • 8
  • 42
  • 62

1 Answers1

6

Make sure you are in the right groups to access removable media.

id -a will show list of groups you are in. If you don't see there plugdev and fuse then you'd better add yourself to these groups by running

sudo usermod -a -G plugdev,fuse USERNAME

Sergey P. aka azure
  • 1,516
  • 1
  • 11
  • 12
  • I wasn't in `fuse`. Seems to do the job! – mreq Dec 18 '12 at 19:34
  • didn't work for me. My user is in both `plugdev` and `fuse` yet the usb drive still mounts without write permission for the user. ["USB drive auto-mounted by user but gets write permissions for root only"](http://askubuntu.com/questions/405993/usb-drive-auto-mounted-by-user-but-gets-write-permissions-for-root-only) is my almost duplicate question. This is `13.04` – Adam Jan 16 '14 at 12:56
  • What do these groups (`plugdev` and `fuse`) mean? – a06e Nov 13 '19 at 10:36
  • plugdev - is a group that has access to pluggable devices, like flash sticks, external HDD, etc. fuse - is a group that has access to filesystems in userspace (fuse). Kernel has support for number for filesystems. But there may be cases that you want to have something mounted as a filesystem which doesn't have a kernel driver for it. It may be sshfs or mtp devices. In this case some userspace driver may be used to emulate kernel api for that filesystem. – Sergey P. aka azure Nov 15 '19 at 01:09