deleting files on ext hdd in Linux?

[oldskooladdict]

Using my Acer Aspire One, with an ntfs portable hdd I can see and use the files on it, but I can't rename or delete them.

If I right click them these options are greyed out, also, the permissions tab is greyed out too.

How can I fix this?! (I have a stack of photos on the drive I wanted to review on a car journey, to decide which were worth processing etc)

[Splash]

Sounds to me like you have the drive mounted as read only, you'll need to remount as read/write (if your distro supports full NTFS capability, which most modern ones do - not sure about the native distro of the One)

[aidanjt]

That'll only work if you can install ntfs-3g.

[oldskooladdict]

I have ttfs-3g installed all ok, that's how I got the drive working in the first place... I've just looked at the permissions:

drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4096 2008-09-04 17:51 PortableSeagate

[directhex]

in a terminal window, type (or paste)

mount | grep gate

and put the output up here. that middle character is a pipe (shift-\ on most keyboards)

[oldskooladdict]

/dev/sdb1 on /media/portableseagate type fuseblk (ro,nosuid, nodev, allow_other, blkside=4096)

Is the response to mount | grep gate

[chrestomanci]

/dev/sdb1 on /media/portableseagate type fuseblk (ro,nosuid, nodev, allow_other, blkside=4096)

The drive is mounted readonly

You need to remount it read-write

mount /dev/sdb1 /media/portableseagate -o remount,rw

[directhex]

okay, Splash was spot on, then. see the section in brackets? that's the options the drive's been mounted with. "ro" means "read-only". whatever did your mounting did it read-only.

without knowing which app you used to mount, i can't tell you the right way to fix it - but i can tell you how to fix it temporarily. you need to remount it - the command to do it is

mount -o remount,rw /media/portableseagate

if your distro uses a root account, you use "su" to get the ability to make changes like that. if it uses sudo, then stick "sudo" at the start of the command above.

[directhex]

or, um, what chrestomanci said.