No permission to make device writeable

**linuxlad** · 08-15-2005, 07:41 AM

The othere day I used the liveCD 3.9 to boot into an xp-sp2 with a couple of viruses on the disk.
I have used Knoppix in the past to make an internal IDE HDD and external usb-HDD writable after setting the "action" to writable, however, the other day I had a different problem with knoppix where after I tried to make the drive writable by right clicking the drive as I have in the past and changing the "action", it gave me an error message, ( I can't remember what it was, but I did googleit and to get around it, I would have to run some "utility" in knoppix that was not inlcluded in version 3.9 of knoppix, although it was included in version 3.7 which I never used to remove the viruses because I used something else.
My question is how can I make the disk writeable using version 3.9 of the liveCD?
Maybe I should go back and write the message down, which I will if noone knows what Im talking about.
Oh I also tried to set the permessions on the specific file to write on all groups/users, but nothinug, probably becase of the inheritance of the permission for the disk.

**UnderScore** · 08-15-2005, 07:53 AM

Writing to a disk depends on the filesystem of that disk. Is it FAT32, if so then there are no issues with it.
Is it using NTFS? If so then you will have great difficulties and could possibly scamble the existsing files by writing to that disk. This is why is may prevent you from enabling write access. CaptiveNTFS was a wrapper driver. It used the Windows NTFS drivers to let Linux write to a NTFS drive. It was reported to be not so stable & quite slow. Development of CaptiveNTFS had stalled for about a year so it has not been included on a Knoppix disk since December. I recently read rumors of new work on captiventfs but I can not say if they are true. If CaptiveNTFS is what you want then LiveCD distros like Helix or Whax may include CaptiveNTFS on it.

**linuxlad** · 08-15-2005, 08:10 AM

Thanks, you hit it right on the nose, it was about captiveNTFS, and I read a few articles about it. The system was an NTFS file system.
So I guess I can't use knoppix 3.9 to write to an NTFS disk so I will check out the other two live cds and read more about "captiveNTFS".

Many thanks