mount fat32 usb drive as read/write [solved --see page 3)]

[Ditzian]

At this point, I should deal with two issues:

(1) For anyone who comes  upon this thread later, haldaemon stops when you hold the stop button down. Five seconds worked for me, but the "wee box" does not appear until after you release the button; do not simply hold the button until the box appears.

(2) For Just18, gparted did not see sdb or sdc or anything except sda.  However, it says this about /dev/sda6: ext4; mount point /home; size 118.30 GiB; used 118.30 GB; unused 175.50 MiB.  Clearly, /home is full.  Should I try to do something about this?  Could it be the cause of other problems?  What should I do?  I have an unformatted partition/dev/sda10, that is 436.10 GiB; can this be used to expand /home?

Jan

[Just17]

Can you browse your /home/username/ directory?

If so look for some large files or a directory you can move to another partition to see if it would cure your problem. You should log out and in again after doing so.

Also there might be some unneeded files in /home/username/tmp which could be deleted.

[Ditzian]

Just18,

I cleared /home so it now has 6.94 GiB of free space.  Not a lot.  Do you know of a way that I can increase the space allotted to /home?  Wait, I see that I can do this with Gparted.

Jan

[Ditzian]

Of all the !@#$%^&*()_+!!!!! problems.  That was it all the time. The problem with the USB device was that /home was full.  I clicked on the USB device manager, then My_Book, which opened.  I went into it and right-clicked on New and it asked what I wanted.  This was the place where before it said I could not write.  I created and deleted a folder.  

OK, Just18, so if I want to increase the /home partition size with Gparted, should I simply copy everything on /home to a spot on My_Book and then let Gparted do its thing?  With luck, I won't lose anything and I will simply delete the backup.

Thank you,

Jan

[Just17]

Sometimes the simplest solutions are overlooked .......  glad you found it! 

Yes backup your /home/username  and then use Gparted to increase the size of the /home partition.

I believe the /home partition will have to be unmounted first so it should not be in use .....  and also the fstab entry for  /home will probably need editing as the UUID of the partition will have changed.

I have not done this ......  so maybe someone else would comment ......  but it should be possible to do from the root account although a liveCD or other Linux Install would be my recommendation.

[gseaman]

Sometimes the simplest solutions are overlooked .......  glad you found it! 

Yes backup your /home/username  and then use Gparted to increase the size of the /home partition.

I believe the /home partition will have to be unmounted first so it should not be in use .....  and also the fstab entry for  /home will probably need editing as the UUID of the partition will have changed.

I have not done this ......  so maybe someone else would comment ......  but it should be possible to do from the root account although a liveCD or other Linux Install would be my recommendation.

I've used gparted to resize and move linux partitions and haven't lost anything yet. It will give you a severe warning if you move a bootable partition, but it worked without errors for me. I did not have to change the UUID.

Galen

[Ditzian]

Thank you to all who helped.  I think I will burn a LiveCD and use that approach.  Wait, I may even have an old one laying around.  I assume that it does not matter which edition of PCLinuxOS I use, I may have a 2009 or 2010.

Jan

[gseaman]

It is much better to use the newest stable CD that you can. Although PCLinuxOS is a rolling release, the amount of upgrades to bring an old CD up to date, would be enormous.

Galen

[Ditzian]

Well, I do not really think it matters how modern it is, since all I am going to use is Gparted.  The rest of the distro is only there to run from the DVD drive; I am not going to install it.  However, the time is not worth the risk, so I have begun the download.  It looks like it will be five hours at the speed I have here in the country.  It is not critical, since things are working OK now, and I can do the partitioning at my convenience.

Thanks again to all who assisted.

Jan

[Xenaflux]

so I have begun the download.  It looks like it will be five hours at the speed I have here in the country.  It is not critical, since things are working OK now, and I can do the partitioning at my convenience.

If you are talking about downloading Gparted, make sure you
have the ....0.13.0-1.iso for CD  and/or the 0.13.0-1.zip for USB.

This particular version has < important > enhancement over the one before.

Have fun