MP3 player: Is there a way to change the permissions?

Support & Help Requests
1

For some years, I have a £26 mp3 player, which allowed me to add and delete files. Last month, I deleted a folder with 4GB which was obviously too much. Caja closed suddenly, and this did a change in the permissions.
Since then, I don't have the permissions to add or delete files. Copy to and Move to Bin are greyed out.
The problem comes from the player and it's storage (SD card) itself. Because it's a player, I can't reformat the device ( I doubt if even that is allowed ) without loosing the player software.
I checked the internet but couldn't find anything close to an idea.
Do you have any idea as a last hope?

That's what I get when trying to change the permissions.
permission

permission2

Many thanks in advance.

2

Hi, @Newhere (Simone) :slight_smile:

I've noticed the text of the error message in the first screenshot of your post:

"The permissions could not be changed.

Sorry, could not change the permissions of "AGP-A02T": Error setting permissions: Read-only file system"

The reference "AGP-A02T" that appears in that error message leads to believe that your hardware / portable MP3 player is made by a company called "AGPTEK", but their web site - http://www.agptek.com/ - is really slow right now.

Usually, when a filesystem becomes "read only", there is unfortunately a good chance that there is a problem with that file system and/or with the hardware device where it is stored (in your case, that would be the storage SD Card of your MP3 Player) and, because of that problem, the filesystem gets automatically mounted as read-only to prevent further damage. For instance, the article "Avoiding a read-only filesystem on errors [LWN.net]" - https://lwn.net/Articles/337765/ - mentions the following:

(...) . A filesystem turns read-only when it encounters errors in the storage subsystem, or a code path which the filesystem code base should not have taken (i.e. a BUG() path). Making the filesystem read-only is a safeguard feature that filesystems implement to avoid further damage because of the errors encountered.(...)"

So, the first thing I would do, if I were you, would be to try to copy all the data (files and folders) from that SD Card to somewhere else (for instance, to a folder in your computer's hard drive / SSD).

It would be useful to know what is the type of that file system. Could you run the following command (with the MP3 Player "mounted" in your computer) and see what appears in the second column of the corresponding output?

df -hT | grep -i 'A02T'

For instance, if I write a similar command about 'boot' in my computer, I get 2 lines of output: one "ext4" partition for the mount point "/boot" and one "vfat" partition for "/boot/efi":

$ df -hT | grep -i 'boot'
/dev/nvme0n1p5 ext4   1,8G  253M  1,5G  15% /boot
/dev/nvme0n1p1 vfat   256M   33M  224M  13% /boot/efi
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3

Hello @ricmarques

Many thanks for your reply. Much appreciated.

I did so and this is the result
/dev/sda vfat 7.8G 3.7G 4.2G 48% /media/xxxxx/AGP-A02T

Let me say, I got a new player in the meantime and my data are generally all saved. This is more a learning thing.

Once, I was wondering why a camera had little space left despite deleting pictures. I learned from that experience that I have to empty the Bin/.trash while the device is still connected. I use the .trash folder in Caja rather than the "Empty Bin".
I should have done the same when I deleted an entire folder with dramatisations from another author. It was stupid of me to try to delete 4 GB at once.

I'm still curious to see if I can change the permission. I can play the mp3 files, but I can't no longer make changes in any of the folders, nut just the Music folder.

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