Generic MP3 player is mounting read only

Trying to sent nieces home with an old laptop that they can use to manage their MP3 collection on between their generic MP3 players.

I am trying to write the .is_audio_player file to the MP3 player when Suse lets me know that the player is read only.

How can I make sure the mp3 players all mount read/write automatically from here on out so that the music collection management is easy enough for an 8 year old?

I had the same problem with mine. The solution is to change the drive permissions or take ownership of it. Use the chmod command line to change the drive owner to their login name. After that, everything should be plug and play. Chown is another alternative, but I didn’t want to change the actual owner.

For chmod, see chmod - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. There are some good examples and links here for the usage.

Good luck!

I tried chmod as su and nothing happened. I still can’t transfer a text file to the player. I can do this in ubuntu but they will need read/write in order for the MP3 player to function. Is there a reason this is bing treated differently than a usb stick? Those work fine.

linux-wb44:/home/eric # chmod 666 /media/disk
chmod: changing permissions of `/media/disk': Read-only file system
linux-wb44:/home/eric # chmod +rw /media/disk
chmod: changing permissions of `/media/disk': Read-only file system
linux-wb44:/home/eric # 

please help

I just had this same problem with my son’s Sansa Clip on Mint 5 (Ubuntu 8.10) with Gnome. You might give this a try.

Plug in the device and wait about 5 seconds

run

dmesg | tail

If you see something like this:

FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sdh)
fat_get_cluster: invalid cluster chain (i_pos 0)
File system has been set read-only

then you probably have a munged file system. Make a note of the device name. Mine was sdh.

run

sudo dosfsck -av /dev/sdX
  • replace X with your device name

When it finishes, unmount the device, unplug it, wait a few seconds, then plug it back in. If all went well you should now be back to rw mode. Check the device and make sure there are no .fsk files on the drive. If there are, just delete them. If you don’t the player may not refresh it’s database properly. My Sansa wouldn’t.

If you deleted some files, you probably have lost some of your songs. Just reload whatever you lost and you should be back up and running.

Hope this helps.

Danny