How can I make my Pen Drive writeable?

Help and Support Help
1

On my RPi3B running Volumio 444, I have installed two pen drives containing my music. To one of the drives, I can add / delete folders and songs from my Windows PC as they show up on the network. The other drive shows up on the Windows network, but I cannot create a new folder or add / delete songs in any folder on this pen drive.

I connected to Volumio on SSH.
I used su to get root privileges. The whoami says root
In the /media folder there are two pen-drives which show up as two directories. ls -al yields

drwxrwxrwx 92 volumio volumio PD1
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root PD2

I used chmod -R 777 PD2 but it says “Operation not permitted”.
I tried chgrp volumio PD2 but it says the same thing.

What should I do?

2

Sorry, I need to correct myself.

I used chmod 777 PD2 but it executed but there was no change
I used chown -R volumio PD2 but it said “Operation not permitted”
I tried chgrp volumio PD2 but it says the same thing as above.

I feel that since the owner of PD2 is root, it is not allowing Volumio to make changes to the folder. I need to either change owner or give write permissions to everyone.

Please help.

3

For root privileges, use sudo.

sudo chown -R volumio PD2

Password volumio

4

I tried that, but I am getting “Operation not permitted”. Is it so because “volumio” is not part of group “root”?

5

Does it have something to do in the way the drive has been mounted on volumio system?

6

What filesystem has the problem drive been formatted with? If it’s exfat for example, you would need additional drivers to write to it.

7

Yes, indeed the formatting is exFAT. Where can I get the drivers required for it, and how do I install them?

8

You’ll have to Google Raspbian sites for it. Far easier just to use a different file format such as ext4 (if you only use it with Linux) or NTFS (I think the drivers are included by default in Raspbian now), or even fat32.

9

Well, I took the simpler route.
My pendrive was a 64GB which accepted only exFAT/NTFS formatting. I tried NTFS formatting but the RPi wouldnt write to it through the network, and would give sporadic data failure report.

Then I partitioned it into two drives and formatted each partition as FAT.
Raspbian understands FAT very well, so all the problems I was having, got sorted out !!

Thanks for all your help guys !!