[mythtv-users] R/O file system on old mythtv install

[Stephen Worthington]

On Fri, 04 Oct 2013 17:14:05 -0400, you wrote:

>I have been trying to copy some mythtv recordings from a backend
>box to either one of my portable hard drives before upgrading to the 
>latest mythbuntu.
>Both drives fail to copy, reporting a read-only file system??.
>
>This has worked before so I'm at a loss trying to figure this out and
>when I tried one of the drives on my main laptop, it appears to be OK.
>
>The mythbox uses that thundar file manager.
>If the copy method is beyond hope can anyone suggest some other
>method to save these files?
>Thanks,
>   -Bert

It sounds like you are using automounting of some sort, and it is (for
some unknown reason), mounting the drives as read only.  If you set up
a proper mount point using the mount command manually, you should be
able to get them to mount as writeable.

So, how are the drives formatted (eg NTFS, EXT3, EXT4, JFS, XFS)?  How
are they connected to the MythTV box (eg SATA, eSATA, USB 2.0, USB
3.0)?  What distro are you using?

Without using automounting, you will need to be able to identify the
drive to the mount command.  So here is what I would do on a
Mythbutntu system.  Open a terminal, and do this:

cd /mnt
sudo mkdir temp
sudo chmod a+rwx temp
cd /var/log
tail -f kern.log

Then plug in one of the drives.  The drive should spin up as the
system sees it and attaches it to a device driver.  As that happens, a
number of messages should scroll by on the terminal.  As part of those
messages, you should see where the system has attached the device -
the messages will include /dev/sd<x> where the <x> bit is the drive
letter that the system found free and attached the drive to.

Now use Ctrl-C to stop the tail -f command, and do this:

cd /mnt
sudo mount /dev/sd<x> temp

If all is going well, the drive should now be mounted as /mnt/temp on
your filesystem, and should be visible there in Thunar.  If not, or it
is still not writeable, then there may be some options that need to be
added to the sudo mount command, or put into /etc/fstab.  Let us know
and we should be able to work out what is needed.

To unmount the drive, in the terminal do this:

sudo umount temp

If it has spun down (as USB drives will do), it will spin up before
the unmount happens.  Wait for the sudo umount command to finish, then
you can unplug the drive safely.