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Mageia4 x86_64 up-to-date
An old chestnut has just cropped up. Trouble with a new USB3.0 Transcend 8GB flash drive, formatted as DOS. Decided to reformat it and picked up instructions by browsing the forums.

This is what I did:

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dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=4096
parted /dev/sdc mklabel gpt          # just a guess
parted /dev/sdc mkpart primary 2048s 8G
diskdrake                                      # reformatted as ext4 -> ext3
e2label /dev/sdc1 Grumium


So far so good. Unplugged and plugged in the device and ran "df -h" to check that the new partition was visible.
As user lcl:

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cd /run/media/lcl/Grumium
touch Grumium


Ouch! root access only, for writes. Nothing in fstab for the drive or another mounted USB3.0 drive which has no problems with hot-plugging. mtab shows that the "good" drive has no user option but the "bad" drive has user_xattr in the list.
I changed the disk label from gpt to msdos at some stage without affecting its behaviour.
What to do? How can I enable user write access?

Hi

If you are using Dolphin either console as " SU" or run command : kdesu dolphin

it will take about 5-10 sec to load- much slower than your usual snappy loading.
at the dolphin header at the right drop down menu - set show menu [from memory ]
highlight the drive on the bottom left of the panel - don't need to access it.
set properties from root to your user name - 2 boxes

regards

Benmc

Thanks for the response. Not at all familiar with KDE, dolphin or file managers. Will switch desktops and try that out.

Well, I did try KDE and made no headway with dolphin. I think what you were describing is basically the pathway to diskdrake, which I used from a terminal in mate. Will have one more go at that rather than bin the device. Thanks.

Nope, even with the disk unmounted in expert mode and setting the user permission property I still cannot write to the device. One thing to note is that the other hotplugged device is treated differently. Right-clicking on the desktop icon brings up a menu with "unmount" near the bottom. For the drive giving the trouble this option is "eject", which works for an ordinary user.
In mtab: good drive has

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ext4, options = rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,data=ordered

bad drive has

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ext3 options = rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,user_xattr,acl,barrier=1,data=ordered

Red-faced again. The problem had to be the mount point and sure enough it had been created under root. Changed the ownership and surprise, surprise it worked fine for the user. To make sure that things ran smoothly after that I deleted the mount point and hotplugged the device again and the mount point was recreated with user ownership. Two days that took!