PCMCIA Hard Drive only mounting as read-only

[SamNitzberg]

I am using a Compaq Ipaq Pocket PC with Familiar Linux installed. I have an expansion sleeve with two PCMCIA card slots available.

I have plugged in my Toshiba 5-Gig PCMCIA Hard drive into one of the slots.

Under my notebooks running Windows, the drive is recognised, and is readable and writable.

I am having problems on my Ipaq:

I can mount the drive :

mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda

but, it mounts as read-only. If I unmount it, I also can remount it with the following:

mount -rw /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda

but it is still read-only.

The file system is of type vfat. I have also tried to use various commands , e.g.

chmod 777 /mnt/hda

and others. The typical response is:

operation not supported - I believe that this is because the file system itself is being seen as read-only.

Any ideas ?

Many thanks-

Sam Nitzberg
sam@iamsam.com

[mdwatts]

Search the JL forums for 'mount vfat umask' and you will find plenty of previous threads with suggestions on what you should change/add to /etc/fstab.

[SamNitzberg]

Hello -

I have tried many variations on my /etc/fstab file entry. The variations typically included umask options, and other parameters. So far, no luck. The same results always : I can mount the partition, but it's read-only.

I had a question - I went and looked through the run control scripts in /etc/rc4.d (and there are many similar examples in the other /etc/rcX.d (where x is 0-9) files.

Many of these have code similar to the following (From grep: )

S45pcmcia: if [ ! -f $ SC ] ; then umask 022 ; touch $SC ; fi
S45pcmcia: if [ "$SCHEME" ] ; then umask 022 ; echo $SCHEME > $SC ; fi

Could such code in the rc scripts be affecting the situation? I didn't want to modify these (say, to umask 000) without being sure of what I was doing.

Many thanks-

Sam

[SamNitzberg]

Thank you for your help.

I am still working on the issue, but I think that there's a good chance right now that I'm only looking at samba-related issues.

The drive that was being mounted may have had a corruption or other issue. I reformatted it, and can now mount it for read-write. I believe that some issue was detected, and the linux o/s would not consider it "writable."

Now, I can mount and write the drive. So, I'm looking at fixing the samba issues.

Thanks-

Sam