Hi! I am running NixOS with Plasma. I was trying to format some usb sticks I had laying around, but there seems to be a problem with setting permissions. I want them to be accessible to everyone, not only root, so I check “permissions” to “everyone”, and run it. But it always crushes. When I check “only root” it works.
Here is the error that comes up:
I tried several filesystems and the error persists. Maybe it’s important - I used them to burn an ISO image.
Can you guys help me?
Best,
Miro
You might need to wipe the partition table, using dd or gdisk/sgdisk. I find odd things exactly like this start happening when I have used the same thumb drives for ‘burning’ ISO images a lot. Even using normal permissions. Something gets corrupted after a while, I think.
Zapping the gpt/mbr seems to take care of things for me.
I am not sure id using the “New Partition Table” option in the “Device” menu does this or not, so it might be worth a try as well.
I have had mostly zero issues since I mostly moved to using Ventoy for ISO usage (no burning) but still burn things like Arm images and the like.
You shouldn’t give permission to the drive, but to some directory in the file system, I think.
And is it necessary? if the filesystem is a FAT variant, AFAIK there are no user permissions carried with it, so files are readable and writable by anyone who plugs in the media in their computer, and if it is a Unix filesystem, permissions & ownership are given to a numeric UID, which for most people on most machines is 1000, so files that you write as a user are readable by pretty much any other user. when the USB storage is transplanted to another machine.
Yeah, I even tried Ventoy, but lost that drive and then had problems with installing ventoy. Anyway, deleting gpt doesn’t seem to be working. I tried fdisk and KDE’s partition manager.
Also, I need to set permissions to everyone because if I don’t I don’ have permission to modify any file on it.
You can always manually change the permissions/ownership after the fact.
For a flash drive, don’t use a permissions based file system - use exfat or ntfs instead.
Okay, thanks, I used exfat.
