usb pendrive

[Massimo]

I want edit some files stored on a 256M fat32 usb pendrive using knoppix.

Starting as normal user, the pendrive is detected but I cannot save.
Starting with knoppix single, the pendrive is not detected (as I can see).

What can I do ?

Massimo Corinaldesi

[Yuanlong]

did you mount the pendrive?

If you didn't, that should be your problem.

[Massimo]

Yes, I mounted as user the pendrive and I opened the files into the editor.

An error message appeared on saving telling I haven't the permissions to modify a file.

[A. Jorge Garcia]

I haven't used USB sticks yet myself. However, I imagine its just that you did not change ro to rw. When you boot from the liveCD, all mounted drives are ro by default to protect the noobie!

Regards,
AJG

[Massimo]

After reading your message I changed to rw: knoppix still reports to me it can't overwrite the file.

Massimo

[j.drake]

Try this. After you change the status, unmount and remount the drive - Rt click-umount, then left click again. I cannot explain why. For some reason, I have to do this after changing rw options with the desktop interface. If someone else can explain, I'm all ears and very curious.

Sort of like my old Commodore 64's external floppy drive - for some reason, a real good WHAMP! on the top of it with my fist was sometimes necessary to make it writable too. Never could understand why. Thank goodness that software has evolved to the point of making physical violence largely unnecessary.

jd

[el_supremo]

Thank goodness that software has evolved to the point of making physical violence largely unnecessary.

You obviously haven't used Windows ME recently, have you? :lol:

Best Wishes
Pete

[j.drake]

Thank goodness that software has evolved to the point of making physical violence largely unnecessary.

You obviously haven't used Windows ME recently, have you? :lol:

Best Wishes
Pete

LOL !! No, I converted our only ME box to XP a little over a year ago, and it was worth every penny for the upgrade!! Thanks for the smile!

Still, I think ME's reputation as the worst of the Windows releases is not fully deserved. After all, it represented the highest evolution of W95. Of the W95 variants, W98SE seems to be the most highly regarded, and ME just put some additional eye candy on top, and added a restore utility that carried forward into XP. Given that the pre-W95 Windows was simply a shell to sit on top of lowly DOS, the advances made to create W95 & subq. were pretty significant for a program not originally conceived to be even a consumer-level OS. Granted, it's pretty pathetic when compared with *nix, but not all that bad when taken in the context of the times and what it was originally conceived to do. Who would have thought that American business would have seriously placed its trust in the original MS OSes in the first place, for anything other that the original stand-alone consumer-level, non-networked personal computer??

jd

[user unknown]

Well - the right way to specify the access to the usb-drive is /etc/fstab and nothing else.
You do it once, and - voila.

I guess /etc/fstab is older than X11, KDE, and usb-drives.
And linux was multiuser-system ever, where it's possible and neccessary, to restrict rights to write to files on a per-user level.

And the knoppix-team decided to make knoppix as secure as possible, not as userfriendly as possible, to prevent newbies from damaging something.

If you want to leave newbie-state, read man fstab and man mount.

[Massimo]

Problem solved.

I was booting knoppix with the pendrive inserted. Otherwise, when inserting the pendrive after knoppix boot, all problems go away.

That demonstrates I'm definitely a neewbe.


Massimo Corinaldesi

[j.drake]

Problem solved.

I was booting knoppix with the pendrive inserted. Otherwise, when inserting the pendrive after knoppix boot, all problems go away.

That demonstrates I'm definitely a neewbe.


Massimo Corinaldesi

That's odd. Booting with the pendrive installed is the only way I ever do it - in fact, I typically save my Knoppix configuration to a thumbdrive instead of the HD, and I wouldn't be able to do this if I couldn't boot with it inserted. I always assumed that for a live CD boot (or poor man's or Knoppix-style hdinstall) with autodetection (IOW, not a hd install), Knoppix wouldn't recognize anything that didn't go through the autodetection process. So, no, that's not a newbie mistake to boot with a pendrive installed - that's entirely legit.

I recently bought a USB thumbdrive that I had problems with in Knoppix - couldn't make it writable. But after I reinstalled the FAT32 filesystem to it in a root terminal, all problems went away, and it behaved like any other thumbdrive. Could be that you might want to try that, because Knoppix should be able to autodetect it. The only other thing I could think of to explain the difference was that this particular thumbdrive, unlike my others, was USB2.0 rated, which should be fully compatible even if the system and/or OS aren't USB2.0. Anyway, now that I let Knoppix make a new vfat file system for it, it works fine in both Knoppix and Windows, inserted on boot or not.

My bet is that something else happened to make it work, and I suspect that you may be misattributing the change to the time at which it is inserted. Just a guess, anyway.

jd