Error while trying to delete files from USB drive

[ph0bYx]

I gave my USB stick to a friend of mine to put a movie on it. When he returned it to me he said that some strange files are generating whenever he mounts a drive and he can't delete them afterwards. He's on Windows so I thought probably a virus of some kind, shouldn't be hard to delete on Ubutnu. WRONG!

I tried the normal way, didn't work, got the error:
"Error removing file: Read-only file system"

Tried to change the permissions on the file, got the error:
"Error setting permissions: Read-only file system"

Tried with sudo power got the same errors.

Here's a screenshot of all that:
http://img121.imageshack.us/img121/110/screenshoteu.png

Those file that are not in the folders are the troubling ones.

How can I remove those? Help meh please

[computathug]

Was the USB Pen Drive taken out of the windows box without using the "safely remove hardware" option. There is a good chance it has. Try reinserting the drive into a windows PC and removing with the correct procedure and then try again.

[ph0bYx]

I plugged it in my windows box, turned on my AV just in case if it is a virus, but it didn't detect anything. Surprisingly a format did work, so I'm guessing it was like you said thug. But I don't understand why because I unplugged the USB countless times in countless places without the Safe Removal and the USB stick is also configured that way:



and this never happened before...

Anyway, thanks for the help thugs

[Lundis]

As you said it was mounted as read-only, you would have had to mount it manually with

Code: Select all

mount -t vfat -o rw,force /dev/USBDEVICE /directory/of/choice

the options (-o) are rw (readwrite) and force, which ignores things like "unsafely removed"-related errors.