OK, I now got back to my wifes phone. When I insert a SD card which works fine in my N900 hers gives me the same forbidden errors when I try to write as I get with her MyDocs directory.
Ruling out fstab and corruption and looking elsewhere.
I think this came after the latest CSSU. Unfortunately I didn't disable the devel repos when the USB broke though the uPdate worked fine on my N900.

I totally lost your progress over the last page, sorry

What is the output of the debugging commands for information

got this bug too (CSSU-devel). i have fixed fstab to correct options and disabled fstab regenerating — no effect. i manually fixed rcS-late to write my hardcoded options to fstab — no effect.

after some investigating i found that MyDocs is not even mounted when hildon starts (i dumped /proc/mounts to file with job 'on started hildon-desktop' and found no MyDocs entry in dumped mounttab).

and then some script (i suppose) mounts MyDocs with 'default' options, and it's owned by root, and i can't write anything there as user until i remount it from xterm (fstab is still correct, so simple umount/mount works ok).

it's not so hard to remount MyDocs after hildon fully starts using xterm, but it's very annoying. i'm rebooting my device once in a week or so, so i can live with that, but i want to know the cause of the problem.

i didn't found the source of the problem so far and i'm stuck.

ah, yes: fsck is ok, there is no errors, partition table is ok, etc, etc. i'm a long-time GNU/Linux user, so i'm pretty sure that i checked the obvious things.

any ideas?

I was unable to fix the other phone and I guess it is awaiting Neo900.
Had the same issue with another newer N900 after an unstable app locked it up, fortunately I had USB to reflash.
Backupmenu and a good backup are the best medicine so you can avoid reflashing, I think this is a CSSU thing but as you can see upthread it is not clear why only root can write.
The way to see if it is the assumed CSSU issue is if you can read/write as root but not as user.

it is that issue, root access to MyDocs works ok. THE question is "why MyDocs mounted with 'default' options even if fstab has right options in it, which script to blame and fix?"

Hi @all,

has anyone found the culprit in the meantime?
Because I'm still experiencing this issue and cannot get it fixed. Moreover I can reproduce it by simply connecting the phone in mass storage to PC and then just disconnecting it.
After that MyDocs is back to read only

I've already tried all the suggestions posted here but nothing could fix it.

Thanks in advance,

J4ZZ

I never solved the problem, it was a phone with broken USB, I think I was unable to get bootmenu to work after errors had built up after using it that way for a few months and the phone was becoming unusable.
I ended up getting another N900 for my wife.
Can you get RW mode as root/sudo?
I think fstab gets bypassed by a dynamically generated fstab substitute file, though this looked fine when I got into it.

Yep, I wrote a small two liner that unmounts /home/user/MyDocs and then mounts MyDocs with all necessary options

And you are right fstab stays unchanged so once you've replaced 'vfat defaults 0 2' with
remount with mount -a works fine also.

But after connecting to PC and/or rebooting the device MyDocs is back to 'vfat defaults' and only root can rw files on emmc.

Hi All,

sorry for posting this here, but browsing through the threads I can not decide where it belogs...

So I attached my n900 to a winxp laptop and made some unzipping. Suddenly windows explorer crashed (froze) during unzip operation so I had to "kill" explorer. After this I reopend explorer and tried to do the unzip again, but it said I have no permission.
I umounted my phone and went to the directory. Everything was looking good, except one file (folder to be specific) said it is a broken symlink. I tried to remove it (from terminal, root access, rm -rf, rmdir, etc.), but no success.
AND everytime I try to remove the file, move the file, open the file my emmc becomes read-only. If I leave it alone, copy files to the same folder, rm files from the same folder, etc., my emmc works normal...

I tried to solve this but I can't; I don't want to fsck the emmc (maybe this would be the solution; or chkdsk in windows) because earlier I lost some data with that (I know: bacup, backup, backup)... So I just wanted to mention this strange behaviour. I can live with this, it is not essential at all, but strange to me...

Cheers,

jm

The vfat file-system does break easily. A crash while operating on a file surely does you give a corrupted file system!

The only way out would be a file-system check, fsck or chkdsk, but it seems you do not feel the need to do what is necessary.

Stop complaining!!!