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sprucio
Contributor
Contributor

USB vfat drive - Read only file system

I am experiencing a bizarre problem with VMware Fusion v1.13 where my external USB drive formatted in vfat is behaving strange. When I run the mount command, I see this:

/dev/sdb1 on /media/HOTDRIVE type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,shortname=mixed,uid=1001,utf8,umask=077,usefree)

When looking at an actual file, I see that I have full permission (rwx) but I cannot modify or delete the file. I get this error when I try to do so:

failed to open for writing: Read-only file system

It takes about 10 seconds after I conect this drive before this happens. When I look at the files and folders using the GUI, there is a lock on all of them as well. I haven't upgraded my host system (Ubuntu 7.10) or VMware in the past 3 weeks. This problem started happening about two days ago.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

>I haven't upgraded my host system (Ubuntu 7.10) or VMware in the past 3 weeks.

This doesn't make sense - the host is the OS that runs directly on the hardware, the guest is what runs inside a virtual machine. If you're running Fusion, Ubuntu can't be the host (since Fusion only runs on OS X).

Have you checked if the USB drive works in the host?

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sprucio
Contributor
Contributor

Hi,

Sorry for the terminology error. I haven't update the guest OS (Ubuntu) or the host OS (Mac) in about 3 weeks.

I left this USB running on my Mac for sometime. It had no problems like the way it did in Ubuntu.

-Bruce

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

Have you checked the Ubuntu logs (e.g. treat this as if it's a real computer and troubleshoot accordingly)? If you create a new virtual machine, does the USB drive work there?

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sprucio
Contributor
Contributor

Ubuntu logs doesn't show any foul play. I rebooted the host OS (Mac) and the problem seems to have gone away. It's been sometime now and I haven't had any issues like this again so I think it may have been a glitch.

Going back to the problem again, the host OS (Mac) didn't seem to have any of these problems that the guest OS was having at the time. During this problem, I had connected/disconnected several times to see if the problem would be resolved.

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