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I'm using Debian Stretch. I plug in a USB, then open Nautilus (as an unprivileged user). I click mount on the USB and Nautilus mounts it. However, only privileged users can write to it.

Is there some way to make Nautilus mount the device so at the very least the user who mounted the drive can write to it?

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  • rw has always been the default; doing otherwise would sort of defeat the purpose. Where do you see "read only" – in mount/findmnt or elsewhere?
    – grawity_u1686
    Commented Nov 3, 2015 at 6:04
  • Sure it's not mounted as rw, but your user just doesn't have permission to write to it? Or maybe there's a filesystem problem that forces a ro mount? Check mount's output as grawity suggests, maybe even dmesg or the syslog for errors
    – Xen2050
    Commented Nov 3, 2015 at 6:08
  • Both commenters were correct, it was mounted rw, but the mounting user didn't have permission to write to it. Please see updated question.
    – nullUser
    Commented Nov 3, 2015 at 6:11
  • What filesystem does the drive use?
    – grawity_u1686
    Commented Nov 3, 2015 at 7:10
  • Drive is NTFS, but I would like it to work for ext4 as well.
    – nullUser
    Commented Nov 3, 2015 at 14:15

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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I figured out why this was happening for me. I had an entry for /dev/sde1 in /etc/fstab:

/dev/sde1     /media/usb0    auto        rw,user,noauto    0  0

I edited that file as root and removed that line, and now USB drives mounted by nautilus are owned and writable by me!

On other systems, it's likely that /dev/sde1 is not the right device. To find out what it would be for you, you can watch the output of sudo tail -f /var/log/messages when you plug in the drive. It should show a bunch of lines like this:

May  1 21:00:10 centurion kernel: [14151.300528] scsi 12:0:0:0: Direct-Access     Generic  Flash Disk       8.07 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
May  1 21:00:10 centurion kernel: [14151.301788] sd 12:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg5 type 0
May  1 21:00:10 centurion kernel: [14151.305140] sd 12:0:0:0: [sde] 1966078 512-byte logical blocks: (1.00 GB/959 MiB)
May  1 21:00:10 centurion kernel: [14151.305755] sd 12:0:0:0: [sde] Write Protect is off
May  1 21:00:10 centurion kernel: [14151.312524]  sde: sde1
May  1 21:00:10 centurion kernel: [14151.316724] sd 12:0:0:0: [sde] Attached SCSI removable disk

The line with sde: sde1 shows that the device for the USB drive is sde and it has one partition, so the device file to mount is /dev/sde1.

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