appdata read-only ?


Tehel

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Dec 10, 2010
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Hello all,


as every other new delighted Pandora owner, I am slowly learning my way on it.


I am an everyday Linux user at work (terminal only), but am not really at ease with its guts, so I parsed the few first pages of support threads (including the sticky one), and having not found anything remotely related to my problems, dares to ask. Hope I didn't miss something.


After a blissful first few hours where everything worked perfectly, a lot of applications cannot start anymore, or can't save anything. I traced this to the fact that everything on my 2x16GB SD cards is owned by root and has 755 permissions. So of course, no process running as a standard user can write or change anything (this also shows in file manager, Delete/Cut/Rename options are grayed in contextual menu for each file/dir).


I could certainly "sudo chmod -R" my way to set to whole tree to "writable by everyone", but I feel bad about it. And I clearly recall being able to move files yesterday evening, AFTER having applied Hotfix 5. What I have done wrong since ?


Both cards have been formated as FAT32 with the Windows XP standard utility in an internal SD card reader. The whole dir structure has also been created on the PC.


Oh and of course, eternal thanks to the OP team for this little marvel. We will still find new uses for it for years.
 
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FAT32 has no concept of file ownership so there should be no way for it to prevent you from writing that way.


What you've probably got is the entire card being mounted read only. This typically happens when a file on the card becomes corrupt: if Linux tries to read or write that corrupt file, it gets an error and then locks the entire file system before it does any more damage; it's a little extreme, but better safe than sorry. Plug the card into your desktop and run chkdsk on it. To temporarily fix the problem, simply eject the card, and then put it back in again so it remounts it with full permissions. It will, however, put it back to read only if it encounters the corrupt file again.


Traditionally this has happened to me while moving a lot of multi-megabyte files onto my SD card. It took me 3 tries to get all of Quake 2 onto my Pandora :p
 
FAT32 has no concept of file ownership so there should be no way for it to prevent you from writing that way.

And no concept of permissions other that global read-only, of course, how could I miss that. My chmod wouldn't have changed anything.


Thank you for your answer. Ejecting/re-inserting doesn't work, even without starting anything, so the corrupted file must be a pnd that the Pandora looks up before I can do anything. I'll try formatting and rebuilding the whole content this evening from the PC.
 
I still recommend the chkdsk. At the very least it'll tell you which file was corrupt to confirm the suspicion.
 
I still recommend the chkdsk. At the very least it'll tell you which file was corrupt to confirm the suspicion.

Did a chkdsk on both cards and it said they're both perfectly fine :(


Anyway, I formatted both once again, rebuild their content and my OP now mounts them read/write. Problem solved. Thanks Stan !
 
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