external hard drive only readable

[nicrnicr]

Dear All,

I don't know what I did.
It's many years ago since I cannot delete anything from my external hard drive.
I think that I could copy files until recently.
Anyway, I copied everything in this hardware, which means that I had the ability to do it.

Now, when I want to copy something, the screen indicates that the flash drive is only readable. How can I change this please?
I saw some people in the internet who had the same problem, but these problems have been all solved differently.
Can someone help me please?

[Qqmike]

I just looked at one of my flash drives.
Plug it in to the PC.
It appears in Dolphin (over on the left bar), right-click on it.
Properties > Permissions tab.

[nicrnicr]

Thank you very much Qqmike.
Indeed, I'm not allowed to change the content, but I'm also not allowed to change the permissions. Therefore my question still exists.

[Snowhog]

With the flash drive plugged in, launch KDE Partition Manager and look at it. What filesystem is it formatted as? What are its Properties?

[nicrnicr]

Thank you Snowhog for your answer.
I am sorry. It is not a flash drive but an external hard disk.
It is formated Fat32.
You can see enclosed the properties.
I beg your pardon for the bad description of the begining.

[Snowhog]

AI Overview

fdisk is a utility used for manipulating disk partition tables, not for checking or repairing file system integrity. To check and repair a FAT32 file system in Linux, you should use dosfsck or fsck.vfat.

Here's how to check and repair a FAT32 device using these tools: Identify the device.

First, determine the correct device name for your FAT32 device (e.g., /dev/sdb1). You can use lsblk or fdisk -l to list your disks and partitions.

sudo fdisk -l

or

lsblk

Unmount the device.

Before running dosfsck or fsck.vfat, ensure the FAT32 partition is unmounted. Replace /dev/sdXN with your device's actual name.

sudo umount /dev/sdXN

Check and repair the FAT32 filesystem.

Use dosfsck (or fsck.vfat, which is often a symlink to dosfsck) to check and repair the filesystem. The following command includes common options for a thorough check and repair:

sudo dosfsck -w -r -l -a -v -t /dev/sdXN

• -w: Writes changes to the disk immediately.
• -r: Interactively prompts for repair methods if multiple options exist.
• -l: Lists the filenames processed during the check.
• -a: Automatically repairs inconsistencies without prompting.
• -v: Enables verbose output, providing more details about the process.
• -t: Marks unreadable clusters as bad, preventing future use of those sectors.

Note: If you are confident in automatic repairs, you can omit -r. If you want to see the issues without automatically fixing them, you can omit -a and -w. Remount the device.

After the check and repair process is complete, you can remount the device.

sudo mount /dev/sdXN /mnt/your_mount_point

Replace /mnt/your_mount_point with your desired mount point. If you don't have a specific mount point, you might need to create one (e.g., sudo mkdir /mnt/usb).

[nicrnicr]

Thank you very much Snowhog, but I don't know how to unmount.
It's written everywhere to right click on the selected partition and to choose "unmount"
(It's also written that I can do it with the keyboard, but it is an adventure for me and I don't know where it can drive me).
It is not possible for me.
I can only choose "work on the mounting" which gives the following window:

[Snowhog]

but I don't know how to unmount.

You open Konsole (the commands you issue will be from the command line). My post #6 tells you what to do.

[nicrnicr]

Thank you Snowhog, thank you Snowhog & thank you Snowhog