My external drive works fine at firs, but after trying to make some larger file transfers eg 6Gb , Im getting “Error writing to file: Read-only file” messages and “you are not the owner cannot change permissions” messages? I also suddenly see locks on all the folders and files in the external drive? its an external nvme 512Gb drive connected by USB. With file transfers of eg movies, it just hangs half way.
If I reboot, it seems ok for a few minutes then when I do any transfers of files to the drive, it suddenly says read only again and locks appear suddenly on all the folders and files?
Also happens when I transfer a folder with alot of small files.
I’ve tried formatting drive and still same problem.
No I just want to copy files to do a manual back up. I just copy and paste. It worked fine like a normal drive before…Until I used the drive to back up a clonezilla image which failed because the drive was too small…After that I formatted the drive and I keep getting these read only and you dont have permission messages constantly. Even formatting a few times doesnt revert to normal. Its just an nvme external drive. My other drives work fine…I dont know why it always fails when copying alot files and suddenly locks appear and the drive seems inaccessible cant paste files or anything into it.
How do I make it back into a normal external drive?
ya I was using Disks app but that didn work…OK i try use gparted…just delete all the partitions and then format like usual? And now locks appear on all the folders and files in the drive again…?
I deleted partitions, didnt see partitions table in gparted but created new partition table…and formatted to ext4 (renamed the drive to midas)… I tried transfer some files and it wont let me paste any files into the drive, I get message example
Error opening file “/run/media/s1888889/midas/To Do Oz.odt”: Permission denied
edit: Also if I do “Take Ownership” of the drive in Disks app then I can paste a few files into the drive but then it hangs half way again if I send a few more. Just hangs.
Now I transferred pasted a few files into the drive ok…but again if I transfer more files it just hangs again and says “error copying to 512gb volume. This destination is read only”
edit: and now locks appear on all the folders and files again in this external drive…
So same error again and transfers hanged. If I right click in the drive the paste word is unbolded and cant paste…If I try unmounting in disks to do again, I get this message now
The problem still persists the next day after trying everything.
This problem is very frustrating and annoying. I see online some other people with the same errors but not much resolution. The only work around, not a real solution as such, was I saw someone online say just format to non-Linux format.
So I have formatted the external usb nvme drive to ex-FAT and the problem seems gone temporarily. I can transfer files from my home to the external drive. Its just silly that we have these problems sometimes with Linux partition permissions in external drives still. And I still dont know why there were these linux permission problems, because the drive worked fine for months.
My guess is somehow when I used the drive from clonezilla imagingm clonezilla somehow may have changed and locked or corrupted the external usb drive permissions somehow? But wish there was a simple way to resolve this so I can use linux format…
man mkfs.ext4
/dev/sda1 should be your main internal drive, not external. - You said before, /dev/sdb1 was the external drive…
