#72 External (firewire) ext2 partition only mounts read-only

[B. H. Lamb]

I have a segate 400 gb PATA HDD in an external firewire enclosure with a 70 GB NTFS partition and the remaining portion is ext2. I have a G4 Mac Mini with a gig of ram and OS X 10.4.9.

The ext2 partition mounts read-write under linux (and even windows). All the files are set to the same user and group as my user and group name on my macintosh. Your mac implementation of e2fsck even works and can write to the partition.

However, the extFSManager preference pane always mounts the partition as read only, regardless of whether or not I have the "mount as read-only" option checked.

Before I mount the partition, the info pane in extFSManager says this about the ext2 partition:

IOKit Name: Untitled 2
Device: disk2s2
Connection Bus: FireWire
Connection Type: External
Ejectable: No
DVD/CD: No
Mount Point: Not Mounted
Writable: Yes
Filesystem: Linux Ext2
Volume UUID: 8A1F8BA5-1A38-4ECE-9E06-CB63DDEC0657
Device Size: 300.34 GB (322,488,552,960 bytes)
Device Block Size: 512 bytes

That last part is wrong; it's got a block size of 4096.

When I mount it with extFSManager, the info pane says this:

IOKit Name: Untitled 2
Device: disk2s2
Ejectable: No
DVD/CD: No
Mount Point: /Volumes/UNTITLED
Writable: No
Filesystem: Linux Ext2
Volume UUID: 8A1F8BA5-1A38-4ECE-9E06-CB63DDEC0657
Volume Name:
Permissions Enabled: No
Supports Journaling: No
Journaled: No
Supports Sparse Files: Yes
Case Sensitive Names: Yes
Case Preserved Names: Yes
Size: 300.34 GB (322,488,552,960 bytes)
Available Space: 173.46 GB (186,253,156,352 bytes)
Block Size: 4,096 bytes
Number of Blocks: 77,497,074
Number of Files: 3,883
Number of Directories: 282

Ext2/3 Specific:

Indexed Directories: Yes
Large Files: Yes

[Nobody/Anonymous]

Logged In: NO

I have the exact same problem altoughg I've been able to mount it rw once when I stopped my machine with an hard reboot and did a fsck -f on the filesystem.
Unfortunatly, I've not been able to reproduce the fix..

[Nobody/Anonymous]

Logged In: NO

I can confirm the problem

[aCiD2]

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user_id=1233842
Originator: NO

I am also getting this problem. I have a 500GB Seagate MyAgent drive, connected via USB2 and my ext2 partitions are always mounted readonly.

[Fredrik Simonsson]

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user_id=66161
Originator: NO

There is a limitation which only allows for partitions with Indexed Directories to be mounted read only. The easiest way to get it working is to change the file system settings and remove the directory index. I plugged the my disk into a linux machine and ran:

tune2fs /dev/sdb1 -O^dir_index

after a fsck ext2fsx gladly mounted the disk