Thursday, December 28, 2017

The Destination is Read-Only (SD Card Stuck)

On my Ubuntu 16.04 box, one of my camera's SD CARDS was stuck in READ ONLY mode.  I could copy files from the card but not to it and I couldn't delete any files that were already on it.  The card worked fine in the camera and worked as expected on a MS Windows machine but not on my Ubuntu Box.  In Nautilus I kept getting the ERROR "The Destination is Read-Only" every time I tried to delete old pictures from the card.



I reformatted the SD Card, I changed the partition type in Gparted, I changed its UUID, and I reset the computer but nothing worked (and YES I checked the little "write protect" switch on the SD Card).  My Ubuntu box just refused to allow any writes or deletes from the SD Card. 

I searched (googled) for 2 hours before I came across this little gem in a comment on a discussion on a non-working thumb drive.  Here's what worked for me.

Open a TERMINAL window and type:

        sudo killall nautilus 

That's it.

I don't think you need the "sudo" but what the hell I used it.

No comments: