How to force mounted drive to be read/write to chown files

knoppix 5.1.1 CD
Trying to recover files from 2 WhiteBox Linux 3.x hard drives



Hi all,

I have a linux box that developed a couple of issues such that I can no longer boot from them. I have booted from the Knoppix 5.1.1 CD and I can see the drives and the files I need to get to.

Network is functioning properly as I can access external websites as well other machines on my local network.

The problem I am having is that by default when booting the knoppix CD you are logged in as user knoppix and the hard drives are mounted as read only.

I have changed the mounted drives to read/write (when mousing over the drive partitions in question the properties indicates the partition is writable), however, whenever I try to change the permissions or owner (chmod or chown) from the root terminal, I get an error telling me the partition is read only.

You may ask why I am trying to change the owner - simple, I need to copy these files off these non-bootable drives to another drive so I can get my server set back up again. As these files are owned by the user "mail" and I am logged in as user "knoppix" I am unable to drag them to Konquerer (being used as an FTP client) to copy them to my network drive (which I am already logged into. I can copy other files where ownership is not an issue so I know copying works).

My problem is that either the drives are not truly mounted as read/write or there is something else going on that I have yet to determine. I think the problem is the former.

Any help or suggestions on how to force the drives to be mounted read/write would be greatly appreciated! Or any other suggestions on how to copy (ftp) these files to a remote device without changing the owner would be very helpful.

Thank you

Dale

Make sure your drive are unmounted first then from a terminal try:

mount -rw /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1

replace hda1 with your drive and mount partition, you may need to specify filesystem type, sometimes its not needed, is so try

mount -rw /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1 -t ext3

replace ext3 with your fs type

Then change permissions:

chown mail -R /mnt/hda1
chgrg users -R /mnt/hda1

You can try ls -l to see if this has been successful, -R will change properties recursively if you have directories and
you can alter the group name as you wish