[PLUG] SD cards always mount read-only

[Amy Kelly]

We boot a couple of older eee PCs from SD cards, my dude has a 8gb one that
he uses for the filesystem and updates the Ubuntu install on periodically. I
have an MSI that quite happily reads SanDisk and other brands in Ubuntu but
my sister's Acer has a long history of Not Working. No hardware support for
it at all. My Droid Pro and the HTC Eris I had will mount the phone as a
filesystem quite happily in Ubuntu, I connect it with the usb cable and it
will open up a file browser. The irony being that I can't get the phone to
mount in Windows, I have to remove the card and stick it in an adapter.
On Oct 11, 2011 7:21 PM, "John Jason Jordan" <johnxj at comcast.net> wrote:

> On Tue, 11 Oct 2011 09:01:49 -0700
> John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> dijo:
>
> >It would be interesting to try it in laptops running other distros.
> >However, I did try live CDs of Lucid and Knoppix with and it was always
> >read-only. And my GRML rescue CD also saw it as read-only.
> >
> >By the end of the day I hope to know how it mounts on a Windows
> >laptop.
>
> So today I went to PSU for class and took the SD card with me to see
> what happened on Windows computers. First I went to the graduate
> computer lab in the basement of Smith. They have some <very nice> Macs
> which have an SD card reader built in, whereas for the Windows
> computers you need to go to the support desk and check out a USB SD
> card reader. I opted for the Mac.
>
> The Mac mounted it automatically, and it was read-write. So (after
> fumbling around the Mac GUI) I found a utility to reformat it.
> Unfortunately, the only choices were several different Mac filesystem
> formats plus "FAT (MSDOS)." It didn't even say what flavor of FAT, nor
> did it have any option to make it bootable or other choices. I went
> ahead and formatted it FAT, and it finished without incident.
>
> I had to go to class, but later I came back and tried the USB SD card
> reader with a Windows computer. This offered me FAT16, FAT32, NTFS and
> something else (forgot). I decided to format it NTFS just because I
> thought that it might be more likely wipe any evil stuff that SanDisk
> had put on the device. It finished the formatting without incident.
>
> I was unable to find any Linux computers on campus that I had access
> to. Not being a computer science major I am not allowed to use
> computers in the CS department.
>
> I am now home. I put the card into my Fedora 14 Thinkpad and got it
> recognized, even though it was NTFS. Using Gparted I attempted to
> format it, but I got the same error message as before: The device is
> read-only.
>
> There remain three possibilities:
>
>        1) The card reader in the Thinkpad is flaky
>        2) The adapter is flaky.
>        3) Linux is flaky.
>
> Further testing will require finding a Linux computer that has an SD
> card slot (capable of > 4GB), and that is -Thinkpad, -Fedora. In the
> meantime, does anyone else have an SD card that is working in a Linux
> computer?
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