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Is Gnome/Udisks mounting your removable media read-only? Check fstab

Filed under: Tutorials and HOWTOs by Hari
Posted on Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 19:07 IST (last updated: Mon, Sep 16, 2013 @ 19:24 IST)

For some reason Gnome kept mounting all my VFAT/FAT32 external USB mass storage devices as read-only. Frustratingly, I had no idea what was going wrong. After a lot of googling around and poking for solutions, including PolicyKit and permissions related to plugdev, none of which seemed to point to the root cause, I finally edited my /etc/fstab file and guess what! I found these lines in it (I had obviously added them long ago for some reason I cannot recollect now):

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
/dev/mapper/linux-root /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
/dev/mapper/linux-home /home           ext4    defaults        0       2
/dev/mapper/linux-swap none            swap    sw              0       0
/dev/sdb1       /media/usb0     auto    rw,user,noauto  0       0
/dev/sdb2       /media/usb1     auto    rw,user,noauto  0       0

Commenting out the two lines at the end did the trick and automounting (with read/write) worked again:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
/dev/mapper/linux-root /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
/dev/mapper/linux-home /home           ext4    defaults        0       2
/dev/mapper/linux-swap none            swap    sw              0       0
# /dev/sdb1       /media/usb0     auto    rw,user,noauto  0       0
# /dev/sdb2       /media/usb1     auto    rw,user,noauto  0       0

Yes, this seems too obvious at first sight, but I didn't remember that I had added these entries in /etc/fstab at all and moreover, I had forgotten that /etc/fstab can play some subtle tricks with automounting tools.

Hope this bit of information is helpful to anybody else running into this problem.

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