New user : No write access to USB drive

[kazuma6666]

Hello,

I'm a new user, I set up my raspberry today. I'm using with it a drive I was using on a windows PC before.

I connected this drive via usb, and I'd like to access it from my windows computer through samba. But it seems I have no write access on it from windows. It's been more than 10 years since I've had a linux box, so I'm not really good with it. But I'm a programmer so I can follow instructions. A friend of mine said It might be because it's NTFS. I'm not sure if it is ntfs or something else. I checked the permissions with ls -l, and changed them too 777 with chmod to be sure it wasn't a permission problem. I have no need for security in my home setup anyway.

So, what can I do? First, how do I check if it is NTFS on the raspberry? Where can I check the filesystem of an external drive? Then, Is there any way to write stuff on a NTFS drive in XBIAN? Or maybe my problem is somewhere else? I didn't set up the share myself, is it possible to set up a read-only share?

I tried "ls >ls.txt" from SSH as a way to test if I have write access from the raspberry, but my putty seems stuck after that. I have no feedback at all anymore. I can't access the raspberry from windows anymore either. After closing the putty window, I can access my RPI again. The ls.txt file was created, but it is empty.

[IriDium]

Please supply the information requested in "Please read before you post"

I don't think it is a filesystem issue - you can test this by writing a test file to the drive from linux. If that fails then read on.

I have a feeling that this might be a driver issue if you do a "mount" I guess your drives are shown as fuseblk which is a generic driver - so defaults to R/O for safety.

It may need a new module NTFS-3G to be installed which has R/W abilities.

I've never used it, installed it or even knew about it until today.

I suggest waiting until someone with a better understanding can give a more universal answer.

[JDJ]

Hello,

i'm using Xbian for a couple of months now and works perfect, till yesterday. Did something wrong and it freezes at startup. So i formatted the SD card en installed the latest version of Xbian on the SD card. Everything works again Except for the access to the harddrive trough SMB. I have connect a USB harddrive to the raspberry en can access everything from XBMC.
In Windows 7 shows it in the network and i see the harddrive. I can read everything on de HDD but can't copy to it. If i try i get a window "Destination Folder Access Denied" "You need permission te perform this action"
In the previous version i had no problems with this. How can i get it work again?

[rikardo1979]

(11th Dec, 2013 10:21 AM)JDJ Wrote:  Hello,

i'm using Xbian for a couple of months now and works perfect, till yesterday. Did something wrong and it freezes at startup. So i formatted the SD card en installed the latest version of Xbian on the SD card. Everything works again Except for the access to the harddrive trough SMB. I have connect a USB harddrive to the raspberry en can access everything from XBMC.
In Windows 7 shows it in the network and i see the harddrive. I can read everything on de HDD but can't copy to it. If i try i get a window "Destination Folder Access Denied" "You need permission te perform this action"
In the previous version i had no problems with this. How can i get it work again?

merged, same subject

[xraxor]

If you want to access files from windows.
1st - make sure SAMBA is installed
2nd- if you can't write onto the hdd attached to your Pi from your pc:
--> sudo nano /etc/usbmount/usbmount.conf check for SMBSHARE= is two lines about SMB make sure the answer is yes (SMBSHARE= yes) for both lines.

let me know

[kazuma6666]

Sorry for the late reply, I had problems with the login in this website. I'm not used to websites without one of my usual passwords, and as this one is generated I couldn't login anymore.

I'll try to include the requested data next time I submit a problem.

In the meantime, the following day my Xbian install didn't work anymore. I came back and it was asking if it could reboot now or not. I said no, began watching something then the RPI rebooted anyway. After that it would not boot up again. I tried reinstalling Xbian on the SD card, but it still would not boot.

So I installed Raspbmc and it works without a problem. I can even write on the 2TB drive that is connected through the USB.

So my problem is solved.

[nick4]

(11th Dec, 2013 11:55 PM)xraxor Wrote:  If you want to access files from windows.
1st - make sure SAMBA is installed
2nd- if you can't write onto the hdd attached to your Pi from your pc:
--> sudo nano /etc/usbmount/usbmount.conf check for SMBSHARE= is two lines about SMB make sure the answer is yes (SMBSHARE= yes) for both lines.

let me know

Hey I am new to Xbian, been using Raspbmc for over a year and decided to give Xbian a try after running into a few issues with Rasp.

Anyhow, I am having the same problem. I can see the USB drive attached to the Pi on my Mac, but i can't write to the drive. I checked the usbmount.conf as you recommended and both lines regarding SMB are set to "yes". Not sure where to go from here.

Thanks!

[xraxor]

hi nick4, im not sure what to do as that all I done when I ran into writing problems. I did tho setup the download packages and the packages didn't have write access to media so had to run this command chmod -R 777 /media/USB_HDD_NAME

not sure why this is happening. can yu setup NFS instead?

[nick4]

(5th Jan, 2014 09:44 PM)xraxor Wrote:  hi nick4, im not sure what to do as that all I done when I ran into writing problems. I did tho setup the download packages and the packages didn't have write access to media so had to run this command chmod -R 777 /media/USB_HDD_NAME

not sure why this is happening. can yu setup NFS instead?

I tried running the above command, but my drive has a space in it's name. I thought usually it got repalce with an underscore, but that didn't work. Drive name is "Seagate Drive" so I tried to run the command with "Seagate_Drive" but that didn't work. Is there another way to run that line?

Also, do you mean setup Xbian to run as an NFS server? I haven't tried that, and I am not sure where to start. I googled around and found a ton of info about XBMC being a NFS client but not a server.

I formerly had the usb drive plugged into my Mac and running a NFS Server from there. But I could no longer add new shares, XBMC could see them, but not access them. After a lot of googling, I found that I am not the only one that had that problem. Seems the Mavericks upgrade broke a few things. So i decided to plug the drive into the pi itself and moved to XBian at the same time. Running videos with the drive plugged into the Pi is much smoother, so I would like to keep it that way.

Anyway, theres my story, and thanks for your help.

Edit: As a side note, I am able to write to the other files on the Pi, I was able to place and delete a few dummy files in the "Xbian" folder, for example.

---

Edit again:


Ok, sorry for all the posting, it occurred to me that the easiest thing to do here is change the drive name in order to run the command. So, I did that.

Here;s an example of what returned for every file on the drive (i was running as root in ssh, btw):

Code:

chmod: changing permissions of `/media/Seagate/Movies/example/example.fanart.jpg': Read-only file system

[nick4]

So just for kicks I dug out an old external drive and formatted, HFS+. Did a brand new install of Xbian. My old install was only a few days old, but I wanted to start from scratch. Still have the same problem. If I run "mount" this is what returns on that drive:

Code:

/dev/sdb2 on /media/Fantom type hfsplus (ro,nodev,noexec,noatime,nodiratime,sync,umask=0,uid=1001,gid=1001,nls=utf8)

So obviously it is listed as read-only, unless "ro" means something else.

If I try to run chmod, I get the same result as above. I can still easily see the drive on the Mac Mini, but can't write to it at all. I can still write to the PI itself, easily copying over files into the "Xbian" folder.

Any idea where to go from here?

[mk01]

hfsplus is Journaling system, support in linux is highly experimental and for RW support you need parameter "--force" during mount.

even then, mapping uid and gid doesn't work. Only way to write to the volume would be to create user on XBian with id=id of owner on the disk.

[nick4]

(10th Jan, 2014 12:47 PM)mk01 Wrote:  hfsplus is Journaling system, support in linux is highly experimental and for RW support you need parameter "--force" during mount.

even then, mapping uid and gid doesn't work. Only way to write to the volume would be to create user on XBian with id=id of owner on the disk.

Thanks for the reply. You are going just a little over my head. I understand what you recommend I do, but I'm not sure how to go about mounting with another parameter. Or creating another user with the same name as the owner.

Should I just reformat to something else? Exfat? If it is the easiest solution, I can just go that route.

Thanks again

[mk01]

Just wanted to tell you hfsplus is no way to go. I have strong feeling Mac officialy supports exfat, but as I don't have windows, never tried.

Or quite easily other way around. You can nicely read ext2/3 on Mac. And one more note - I was few times sending the command / change to mount parameter for cifs to work from linux -> mac without problems.

And it really works. It just looks like not.

[nick4]

I reformatted the drive to exFat. This had no change, when I ran mount on the pi, it showed "rw" but I couldn't write to it from my Mac.

However, I did a full update to Xbian, and there was an update for the Samba package. Installed that, rebooted and now everything works as it should. So whatever was in that update fixed my problem at least.

So as of now, I have full read/write to the external drive. Thanks for all the replies, hopefully this will help someone else out.

[mk01]

@nick4,

indeed there was a fix released a time ago. glad you managed.