I too have the nautilus read-only misbehavior on the very latest 12.04LTS (x86_64) system and have the following observations, including a simple-enough workaround since running into this problem quite a while back....
I can cause the false read-only behavior on demand by first inserting a read-only USB flash such as a camera's Secure Digital card with the "lock" switch thrown, via an SD card reader. But after removing/unmounting that read-only SD card, *every* subsequent insertion of a normally-writable USB flash drive then gets the above- reported symptoms: its considered read-only by nautilus yet a "cp" command from the shell to the USB media works fine which shows the system mounted it correctly for writing. As I believe someone mentioned earlier, it must be that the nautilus state is contaminated/broken under some scenarios. My intentional read- only flash drive method is just one solid way to cause that broken behavior "hangover". So my workaround is.... When I encounter this false read-only, I simply unmount/remove the removable device(s), close any windows using nautilus, and then I do a "killall nautilus" from the shell (I always see a non-window nautilus whose parent is pid 1 with my user id, presumably this is the thing with the broken state that I kill). After that, reinserting the very USB drive which falsely received the read-only error will now work properly. I can drag things onto the drive using the fresh instance of nautilus that is launched.. Its a shame that after more than 2 years, on a claimed LTS system, I have yet to see even a "we aren't going to bother fixing this one" response from the Ubuntu folks on this bug report. Its not been closed or marked as a duplicate, its still marked "unassigned". Makes me question why I've been recommending Ubuntu LTS releases at all to my companies for production use.... -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to nautilus in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1021375 Title: Nautilus says the USB stick is read only when it is not Status in nautilus package in Ubuntu: Confirmed Bug description: First time I use an USB drive since I updated to 12.04 and I found a really annoying bug on Nautilus. Nautilus claims that the destination drive is read-only when in fact it is not. How to reproduce: 1. Connect a USB stick drive to your competer. 2. The USB will appear in the desktop. 3. Open two Nautilus windows one in your home folder, other in the USB stick drive. 4. Select any file from your home folder (small enough to fit the free space in the USB drive) 5. Drag the file and drop it in the USB drive window. -- Nautilus will say that it cannot copy the file because the destination is read ony -- If you try the copy the same file with the terminal you will see that the file is copied without problem, other programs like gedit or LibreOffice can write in the usb stick drive just fine. It is not a problem with the USB stick, as shown here: [ 6232.288064] usb 2-1: new high-speed USB device number 6 using ehci_hcd [ 6232.426378] scsi8 : usb-storage 2-1:1.0 [ 6233.468489] scsi 8:0:0:0: Direct-Access Kingston DT 101 II PMAP PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS [ 6233.469862] sd 8:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0 [ 6234.178262] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] 3909632 512-byte logical blocks: (2.00 GB/1.86 GiB) [ 6234.178735] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off [ 6234.178740] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 23 00 00 00 [ 6234.179251] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present [ 6234.179256] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through [ 6234.183369] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present [ 6234.183376] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through [ 6234.210138] sdb: sdb1 [ 6234.212732] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present [ 6234.212736] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through [ 6234.212740] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk The permisions on the removable drive are set correctly: sergio@shana:/media$ ls -lah total 12K drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4,0K jul 5 10:20 . drwxr-xr-x 23 root root 4,0K jul 3 11:01 .. drwx------ 5 sergio sergio 4,0K dic 31 1969 DESIGNPLUS There is enough free space in the drive: sergio@shana:/media/DESIGNPLUS$ df -h S.ficheros TamaƱo Usado Disp Uso% Montado en /dev/sda2 50G 5,5G 42G 12% / udev 1,5G 4,0K 1,5G 1% /dev tmpfs 579M 872K 579M 1% /run none 5,0M 0 5,0M 0% /run/lock none 1,5G 1,1M 1,5G 1% /run/shm /dev/sda1 497M 113M 360M 24% /boot /dev/sda5 245G 111G 122G 48% /home /dev/sdb1 1,9G 681M 1,2G 36% /media/DESIGNPLUS A file can be copied to the USB stick using the cp command for example. sergio@shana:~/Trash$ cp wireless.txt /media/DESIGNPLUS sergio@shana:~/Trash$ cd /media/DESIGNPLUS sergio@shana:/media/DESIGNPLUS$ ls -lah total 204K drwx------ 5 sergio sergio 4,0K jul 5 10:38 . drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4,0K jul 5 10:20 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 sergio sergio 117K jul 5 10:14 ._Screen Shot 2012-06-30 at 8.50.37 AM.png -rw-r--r-- 1 sergio sergio 55K jun 30 08:51 Screen Shot 2012-06-30 at 8.50.37 AM.png drwx------ 4 sergio sergio 4,0K jul 5 10:05 .Spotlight-V100 drwx------ 2 sergio sergio 4,0K jul 5 10:05 .Trashes -rw-r--r-- 1 sergio sergio 4,0K jul 5 10:05 ._.Trashes -rw-r--r-- 1 sergio sergio 73 jul 5 10:38 wireless.txt But nautilus just dennies to copy the file claming that the destination is read only, when it is not. I tested it with two different USB sticks in two different computers running Ubuntu 12.04 and the same result. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/1021375/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : desktop-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp