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My drive was just fine an hour ago. I copied a couple of movies to it, and the cord accidentally came out, and now it keeps loading as "read only" every time. I tried rebooting, logging in and out, switching cables, running sudo nautilus and changing all permissions to read and write, but even in sudo nautilus it told me that it is a read only system and that I cannot copy anything to the drive.

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What file system - NTFS? If so, it's probably marked as "dirty". – Marty Fried Aug 12 '12 at 4:37
no, i think its fat... i dont remember what i did with it. but what do you mean by "dirty" ?? i dont understand why it would work perfectly one minute and not at all anymore – mandy Aug 12 '12 at 6:09
"Dirty" is an operating system flag that is set when the disk system is powered down in a way that is not "clean", ie, files were not closed, etc. This is how Windows knows sometimes that it needs to run chkdsk to make sure everything is OK. But I'm not sure exactly what the symptoms are for Linux, and I don't really know if it affects FAT. – Marty Fried Aug 13 '12 at 5:13

closed as too localized by Tom Brossman, ObsessiveSSOℲ, maythux, Mitch, devav2 Oct 8 '12 at 6:25

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1 Answer

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Is your disk on NTFS filesystem?

I had a similar problem on a NTFS formatted disk.

I did sudo ntfsfix /dev/sdb1

See How do you repair an "input/output error" in an NTFS partition?

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