Thumb drive switched from rw to ro

[Bruce_n_Duane]

Tale of two 32GB thumb drives I bought the same day.
Both were reformated to ext2 using Gparted on Lucid Puppy 5.28-5

Both were working great.
I was writing files to both.
For this discussion I will label the read/write drive sdb1 and rw drive sdc1

Suddenly sdc1 changed from read-write to read-only.
I did have the battery go dead about that time so sdc1 was not unmounted.
The mount point does not seem to make any difference.
changing to different version of Puppy Linux doesn't change it back to rw.

sdb1 rw works pmount says ext2 29.8G 27.2G free
sdc1 ro ext2 29.8G 12.4G free

/etc/mtab
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1 ext2 rw,relatime,errors=continue 0 0
/dev/sdc1 /mnt/sdc1 ext2 ro,relatime,errors=continue,user_xattr 0 0

Questions:
Why would sdc1 change to read-only?
Why does to always now mount as read-only nomatter where it mounts?

What commands to I need to do to fix this.

I have Lucid Puppy 5.28-5, Precise 5.71, Precise 5.62

Thanks in advance for your help.
-Bruce.

[bigpup]

Suddenly sdc1 changed from read-write to read-only.
I did have the battery go dead about that time so sdc1 was not unmounted.

This could have caused corrupted file system on this drive.

Try this:
Boot Puppy from some other source than sdc1.
Keep sdc1 unmounted.
Run Gparted.
Select sdc1 to scan.
Right click on sdc1 partition.
Select check.
See if it finds any problem and corrects it.

[Bruce_n_Duane]

Thanks Bigpup:

I tried gparted on the thumb drive and did a check on the ext2 partition.
It came back with an error that the partition could only be mounted read-only.

Gparted can not format or repartition the drive because it always mounts
as read-only.

How do I get puppy to mount it read-write?

I the old days, that was done by modifying the mtab & fstab text files, but in the age of modern linux, all that is done with magic binary files and programs.

-Bruce.

[mikeb]

Failed stick sounds like... you could try repartitioning from scratch (new partition table) but might find it will not let you...if it does then there is hope, if not then in the trash with it.
What brand was it for reference?
mike

[Flash]

I had a flash drive do that and solved the problem when I used Gparted to remove the boot flag. I assume the boot flag was set when I got the flash drive, and the boot flag shouldn't have anything to do with the permissions, but when Gparted removed the flag, I could once again erase stuff from the drive.

[Bruce_n_Duane]

Thumb Drive: Info from Gparted
SanDisk Cruzer Fit 32GB (29.82Gib formatted as ext2)

Partition table: msdos
Heads: 255
Sectors/track: 63
Cylinders: 3892
Total Sectors: 62,530,624
sector size: 512

Flags: none

Bought 3 of these via Amazon
This is the one I have used the most.
It was used for downloaded file storage and few files were ever deleted.
All files were backed up to my house hard drive and it's hard drive backup.
All downloaded file went to the laptop hard drive then copied to flash.

Therefore no file loss, just $16 US.

First formatted to ext2 and started using it on Oct 17, 2013.

Tried changing the partition flags and Gparted can't do it.

It always get mounted as read-only like it was a CD.

Is there a way to wipe it and put a new partition table on it?
Gparted 0.8.0 with Lucid Puppy 2.5.8-5 does not want to write anything to it.

-Bruce.

[mikeb]

Hmm if gparted cannot write it looks like hardware failure.

I had a CF card do it after a short life.
Amazon are pretty good and might replace it for you ... they did for me,

mike

[Flash]

H-P makes a utility for dealing with flash drives that by all accounts is pretty competent. That's all I know. I've never used it.

[Sylvander]

I once had a similar problem with a Flash Drive.
I fixed it by using a special [FREE] Windows utility program to low-level reformat it.

If you're interested, I'll try to find the thread about it here on the Puppy forums.

[Bruce_n_Duane]

Thanks for all the help.

I will just crush the thumb drive and destroy it.

I can not return it to Amazon because of the unencrypted data on it.

I do not do Windows! I use a real OS ==> Puppy Linux !!!

-Bruce.

[Sylvander]

I do not do Windows! I use a real OS ==> Puppy Linux !!!

Same here...
Sort of...
I used "FalconFour's UBCD"->MiniXP to run the exe file for the portable program.
See THIS post, and THIS also.

Hey, it got the thing working again!