Before anyone freaks, let me tell you what has happened.

I had built another JUNKBOX computer together last week for a teacher friend of mine. He wants to use LibreOffice Write to document some research he is doing. While showing him how to get into Write, he gave me a usb drive so I could show him how to Save and Copy the files he is writing to it.

The usb drive had some old stuff written on it, so I decided to use Gparted to Rename and Format the drive. Since the usb was going to be used also on a Windows machine to print the document, when I Formatted it I used FAT. Then I ReLabeled / Renamed the usb.

All this time, Write was in Window 1, and I was doing the above things in Window 2. I went back to Window 1 and started using Write to type out some junk to show him how to copy it over. When trying to SAVE AS the test typing, I got an error message telling me the usb drive was NOT MOUNTED. __{{emoticon}}__

I checked in both ROX file and with SpaceFM to see, and BOTH show the usb as MOUNTED. But whenever I try to save whatever to the usb drive in Write, I still get that weird message, telling me it is NOT MOUNTED. I then went back into Gparted and Unmounted then Mounted the usb drive. And still get the same message.

I rebooted the machine thinking that maybe it was some carryover from when I first started. NOPE! The same message in Write, NOT MOUNTED. I again tried with G[arted to UNMOUNT / MOUNT of the usb drive and no changes. It works okay on his Windows laptop, but not on his AntiX JUNKBOX I made him. I brought it home and it works on my JUNKBOX.

I ain't no genius but this one is weird to me. Two other usb drives he has work okay with Write to SAVE AS, but this one usb refuses to let Write write to it on his machine. __{{emoticon}}__ He could scrap this one, but it's a 16Gb while the others he has are 2 Gb.

Any ideas???

Is the drive locked or is one of those read only software windows only run program like U3 that Sandisk uses?

Another thing.

Get some idea by running as root and also as root
to get the dev/sdb./dev/sdc, or whatever. Then open rox as root while in terminal. Go to /media and make folders like sdb.sdc., or whatever fdisk or blkid says. Then close rox. Then as root in terminal
Open rox again and see if it mounted. Edited because fatmac showed where I screwed up in mount command.

quick point. did you do fat16 or fat32? fat32 would be the way to go.

Nope, and there is no software on it. Remember I mentioned I formatted it as FAT with Gparted BEFORE we tried to save stuff to it.

I can only tell you what I know from experience. The U3 software for Windows that came on my Sandisk Cruzer USB drives was read only which no matter how many times I ran gparted never removed it. I had to go here to remove it using Windows operating system.


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Dolphin -- FAT32...I can't even remember when was the last time I ever used FAT16. But I'll recheck tomorrow when I'm over.

Roky -- The usb wasn't a Sandisk. I think it was one of those"Chinese" paid advertisement models that businesses give at schools to the kids. Or one of those you buy at Office Depot on sale.

I am not sure if this will apply but normally when I reformat an usb key (generally an ext format) I need to mount it one time as root, chmod 777 the mount point * after * mounting and then unmount and use the stick as normal

You have formatted it as the root user & now the mount point needs to be accessible by his user account.
Hopefully you created a fat32/vfat filesystem, not sure if you will have fat12 module on your system. If that doesn't get auto mounted, try mounting it manually.