On 18/08/12 18:44, David wrote:
Hi Peter
It will help people to help you if, instead of writing vague things like "the problem remained", you present us with an exact *unedited* contiguous copy and paste from a terminal showing both 1) each entire command you enter 2) the *entire* response to it So that we can see exactly what is going on. It is also less effort for you.
At this point, it would be interesting to see that information for: 1) The original "backup some data" attempt in your first message. Exactly what command do you enter, and what is the response. Until you show that, we have no idea what you are doing or seeing. 2) A simple 'mount' command. 3) 'sudo fsck /dev/sdb1' Exactly what was the response.
Does your system auto mount this drive? Assuming it is usb connected, have you tried unmounting it and then removing and re-inserting the usb connection. Use the verbose -v option for umount.
Also, when doing this test you might show us 'ls -l /media' twice, once with the drive disconnected and then with it disconnected. Also, what do you see in dmesg after doing this. I don't have ubuntu so am not sure of the file, perhaps /var/log/dmesg or the command 'dmesg'.
The cause of what you are seeing is more likely something to do with how the drive is mounted rather than the actual filesystem permissions. So I wouldn't be fooling with chmod at this stage.
Hope this helps :) David
Hello David, The exact problem is that when using Nautilus or Caja to copy files to my external hard drive the "paste" option cannot be selected.I assumed this was due to permissions not being set properly but maybe this is not the case.Anyway I have decided to back up th data on the external hard drive in question and then format it.Thanks everyone for your help. regards Peter.