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I have an external 320GB Samsung drive, which got marked as read only after I put a system on suspend a while back and then pulled the drive out. I had forgotten to unmount the drive before doing so, and so it is marked as being owned by a user that technically does not exist.

Since I no longer remember which drive I was using at the time, and the laptop I was using no longer works, I wonder if there is a way to get the drive to show up as writeable again. I've tried it in systems with Windows and they are able to read/write to the drive, but it appears to have a filesystem error which they are unable to fix.

The Drive is in FAT32 format, and unfortunately, I cannot get the files that are on it off of it (yet). Is there any option for marking the drive as writeable?

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I'm confused. From the penultimate line, you cannot get files off it, presumably in Ubuntu. So then it's not even read-only in Ubuntu? – Sparhawk Dec 29 '12 at 5:15
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Are you able to mount the external hard drive? Or does it give you a message that it cannot mount as it is a read-only drive? – Jobin Dec 29 '12 at 5:16
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@Sparhawk, by getting it off it, the asker might mean that he is not able to remove them, I suppose. – Jobin Dec 29 '12 at 5:17
@Jobin Good point. "Off" not "off". :) – Sparhawk Dec 29 '12 at 5:18
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Wont chmod work here? What error does it give, if not? – Jobin Dec 29 '12 at 5:22
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