USB devices showing as read only

See this bug.

Run this command to kill Nautilus (Files):

killall nautilus

When you attach your USB key to your laptop:

• run sudo -i (so that you won't type your password all the time)
• run df -Th(to see where your USB stick is mounted)
• unmount your USB stick
• run dosfsck on the device you saw from your previous command. Example: dosfsck /dev/sdc1
• remove and reattach your USB stick

Problem should be solved now.

Now, for your HDD, please follow the answer to this question. It is about an external HDD but it is the same thing for your case.

I had this problem too. I got an error while copying to my USB stick. I am using Mint 17.1 Cinnamon, with the 3.13.0-43 kernel with and Caja as the file manager.

When I looked at the media directory using this terminal command:

dir /media

I saw that the layout had changed. Normally, you expect to see the drives listed here, but now they are listed under your username, and guess what? That username has only ROOT permissions.

What I did was to run:

sudo chown [username] /media/[username]

and:

sudo chgrp [username] /media/[username]

where I replaced [username] with my username. After that I removed the USB stick, waited and then put it back in. The problem was solved, I can now write to it!

I got the same error when using GParted to set partition table and format my USB stick.. after that all USB drives went to "read-only".

But under root copying worked fine...

Issue was gone after machine restart. So I guess that this problem may occur when using GParted.