I have had a 256GB PNY USB stick for quite a while now, and it used to work just fine. When I bought it I removed the FAT32 partition that PNY put on it and created a new one, and formatted it to Ext4. I did this because I frequently have files over 4GB in size.
Recently the computer locked up (no mouse, no keyboard) so I had to hit the power switch. The PNY drive was mounted at the time, and it remained plugged in when I rebooted. But after rebooting I discovered that it was owned by root. I'm still scratching my head over how that happened, but I solved the problem with 'sudo chown jjj:jjj /media/jjj/256GB-2.' (When I created and formatted the Ext4 partition with gparted I gave it the label 256GB-2.) Later I discovered that every time I unplugged it and then plugged it back in again it was once again owned by root. Usually it is /dev/sdd,so I also tried to chown /dev/sdd, but that hasn't helped, nor has 'sudo chmod 777 /dev/sdd' or 'chmod 777 /media/jjj/256GB-2. Earlier today the hard drive light began flashing continuously, and eventually I discovered that the culprit was a program that had finished the task that I had used it for, but which I hadn't shut down. I closed it and the hard drive light stopped flashing, yet I began experiencing strange behavior by the GUI file manage (Thunar), as well as the ls command. After fiddling with things for an hour without success I decided to just reboot. Before doing so I backed up all the files to my Mediasonic external drive, then removed the 256GB drive. On rebooting the GUI did not come up, but the keyboard was working, so I opened a command shell, which came up as root. I gave it the command 'reboot,' which worked and this time the GUI came up normally. I poked at things and the file system seemed to be working normally again, so I plugged in the 256GB drive, and it failed to come up in Thunar, even though its light flickered as it always does when it is plugged in. It was also not visible with the ls command or with mount. I spent nearly half an hour muttering vile words, and then suddenly it appeared. Quickly checking, it appears that all the files are intact and owned by me. For the record, the computer is my laptop which is pushing six years old, and on which the OS is Xubuntu 16.04, up to date. It has two internal SSDs: /dev/sdb (512GB) which holds / and /home, and /dev/sda, which is a 1TB SSD, for data storage, but mostly empty. The SMART tool says both are OK. I read the man pages for chown and chmod, but I suspect that I don't understand them thoroughly. It perplexes me that this USB stick isn't working like it used to. Thoughts and suggestions welcome. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
