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Originally Posted by signum
I've had several flash drives mount themselves as "read only", which will lock up on a write. This was usually because the file system had become corrupted. Running "dosfsck" from the command prompt fixes it up. Make backups first, even if you never use them. This is the only time you can do that. Do a "man dosfsck" from the command prompt to see what you are getting into first.
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Dosfsck is the equivalent of the DOS/Windows CHKDSK program. (SCANDISK on Win9X.)
Backups are good ideas because flash drives, by default, come formatted as FAT16 (for drives <= 2GB) and FAT32 (for drives > 2GB). The FAT filesystem is understood by just about everything, but it's not terribly robust. In FAT, the smallest area of disk readable/writable in one operation is the cluster. How large a cluster is depends on disk size. Each cluster must have a unique address.
FAT16 uses 16 bit addressing, so there are 65,536 possible unique addresses. The largest cluster the FORMAT program can create is 32KB. This leads to a 2GB volume size limit for FAT16 volumes. FAT32 uses 32 bit addressing, so many more clusters (and much larger volumes) are possible.
The FAT table is where track is kept of what clusters on disk belong to what files. If the file system gets corrupted, that table has been partly trashed. Running CHKDSK or dosfsck fixes it, but FAT lacks the redundancy to let CHKDSK/dosfsck know what blocks used to belong to what files, so you are likely to have lots of "lost clusters". CHKDSK repairs file system by assigning the lost clusters to files with names like FILE0000.CHK, and putting them in a FOUND.000 directory. About all you can usually do is delete the FOUND.000 directory and it's contents, as the individual *.CHK files are unlikely to be complete or usable.
NTFS and extfs have more redundancy, and CHKDSK/fsck can generally repair the damage and put everything back where it's supposed to be. (The only time I had a problem on NTFS, a directory happened to be sitting on a bad block on disk. The contents had been properly recovered under the original file names, so it was just a matter of renaming the FOUND directory CHKDSK created to hold them.)
Bottom line, if the stuff on the flash drive is important, make sure you back it up regularly.)
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The black bar in the navigation toolbar in Firefox is often caused by trying to use a buggy theme. Go to Tools ->Add-ons ->Appearance to see what theme is in effect. Select and enable a different one (I suggest the inital default theme) and see if the black bar goes away.
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Yep. Good call.
I use the default FF these in Ubuntu, and have never seen this issue, but themes are tricky things in Firefox on any platform. (I see complaints all the time about addons that don't work correctly with some themes.)
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Dennis