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Any USB stick I put in now says that "the destination is read only." I have tried 

sudo mount -o remount,rw  /dev/sdb1 (sdb1 being the path of my usb)

but this does not work (still receive "read only" msg). I have done an umount and remount. No go. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I am a newbie, so please keep any answers simple.

zx485
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Steven May
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    Is the stick writable on other comps? – Pilot6 Jun 10 '18 at 18:16
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    The question, as written, implies, but does not explicitly state, that is a recurring problem with multiple USB sticks. Please edit to specify whether this is the case. Also, why are you mounting USB sticks with sudo? Removable media can usually be mounted from a file manager. – xiota Jun 10 '18 at 19:34
  • Try to analyze the problem according to this link, Can't format my usb drive. I have already tried with mkdosfs and gparted. -- What have you done with the USB sticks? Are they standard sticks, that you use to store files? Are they USB boot drives (for example to install Ubuntu)? Have you created or modified the partition(s) or file system(s)? – sudodus Jun 10 '18 at 19:40
  • I had assumed it was all usb sticks, but I had only tried 3 of them. I just tried 6 more, and one of them works! Not sure if it's a coincidence, but this one has the most free space (16gb stick with 11gb free). The others all have less than a gig free, yet plenty of room (e.g. one has 650mb free), to copy the 900kb file I am trying to copy onto them. – Steven May Jun 11 '18 at 02:40
  • From your answer I assume that these USB pendrives are standard sticks, that you use to store files and I would guess that they are healthy (at least most of them), so you should be able to write files to them. Please try to unmount and mount them according to the following link, How do I use 'chmod' on an NTFS (or FAT32) partition? – sudodus Jun 11 '18 at 05:48
  • These are standard pendrives, just file saving and nothing else. I neglected to answer xiota: I tried to mount and dismount from sudo because it was one of the suggestions that I saw from people experiencing similar problems (before I asked on this forum). Does anyone think this could be related to all of the 'read-only' pendrives having limited storage left (e.g. one has 650mb out of 16gb available - BUT the file I was trying to save was a word doc that was only 900kb)? – Steven May Jun 12 '18 at 12:50

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