I love USB drives, they sure beat what we used to have back in the 90′s when we I would use multiple disks to boot one tiny game. Oh, and if there was a mistake anywhere, you would have to start over.
Wow!! Those were the days. ”Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, when I was real young, man I couldn’t picture this”. Yes I will stop there 
Do you remember the time? When 1.44 MB was something and then whoop there it was…the Zip Drive. I never used one of those personally but they sure made carrying around lots of files or large files a lot easier.
Its time to go forward to 2012, where for quite cheaply one can purchase a device known as a USB or a flash drive. Now the USB refers to Universal Serial Bus, it is a type of port on PC’s and Laptops, and it is what the USB drive connects to to transfer stuff to and fro. “Now that song is in my head, goodness what could it be”.
Excuse me for quipping.
Ahem, back to life….back to reality. The storage space has grown tremendously from a little over one Megabyte to over 60 Gigabytes of information. You can transport entire games, movies, text files etc on a little device that isn’t even the size of your finger. Isn’t that awesome? Yes it is!!!!
Now, the only thing about these USB drives is that sometimes they just stop working. You want to make sure you unmount them before you remove them from your computer so you don’t damage your data. You may get away with taking them out without doing so for a while but it will likely catch up with you.
The other day, something new and unexpected happened to me. I connected by USB drives into my laptop and while I could read the files that were on them, I could neither delete anything nor add anything to them.
As it turned out, somehow the permissions to the drives were altered on my laptop. This was super annoying as I was setting up another PC at the time. Eventually though, I was back up and running thanks to the Internet. I was able to look up the error messages I was receiving and was able to do what I needed to do.
Here’s what I did:
you need to change permissions to allow read and write for your new user account. this can be easily done using nautilus
sudo nautilus
right click and goto properties on the directory you want to change.
and then all the permissions that were grayed out will not be, change the permissions and apply, viola!
It worked for me, so far so good. Will it be a permanent fix? Time will tell.
Thanks to:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1484042 for helping me find at least a temporary way around my issue.
English: A Sandisk-brand USB thumb drive, SanDisk Cruzer Micro, 4GB. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
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I love keeping a bootable Linux thumb drive. Being able to boot someones PC into Linux after their OS is messed up (virus, failing hard drive etc.) has saved me from hours of pain, allowed the recovery of files though lost and made me look like a wizard to friends and family
All that power in the size of something so small…amazing.
Oh, it really is amazing. Do you remember using disks?
I certainly do…and I am old enough that I remember 8″ floppy disks!!! OK…only just old enough for that but I remember doing support on an Olivetti P6060 that had those, along with a 40 character LED display (no screen). We’ve come a long way!
Oh wow!! The last time I used a floppy disk it was one of the 5 1/4 ones i believe and that was in the early 90s when I was a little kid
Yes, I agree. Thanks so much for commenting.