How to repair read-only USB devices

On Fedora, Debian & Ubuntu…

Some MS-DOS formatted USB devices (FAT, vFat) may be mounted as read-only on Linux systems. You won’t be able to write on it. In order to fix this, follow these steps. Some commands may require administrator privileges.

1 : Plug in the USB device, it should be automatically mounted on the system, then list your drive with df -Th

➜ df -Th
Filesystem     Type      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/nvme0n1p7 ext4       40G   22G   17G  57% /
/dev/nvme0n1p6 ext4      974M  307M  600M  34% /boot
/dev/nvme0n1p8 ext4      130G   40G   83G  33% /home
/dev/nvme0n1p1 vfat      599M   14M  585M   3% /boot/efi
/dev/sdb1      ext4      916G  324G  546G  38% /run/media/USB-DEVICE

2 : Identify your drive, for instance it could be:

Filesystem     Type     Mounted on
/dev/sdb1      vfat     /run/media/USB-DEVICE

3 : Unmount it:

➜ umount /run/media/USB-DEVICE

4 : We’ll use the dosfsck command to check and repair the filesystem:

➜ dosfsck-a /dev/sdb1

5 : Once done, remove the USB drive and plug it in back to system.

Done!