trouble with my portable drives

[soldierofflare]

im having major trouble with linux im using mandrake 9.1 and the kde interface it can read my portable usb flash drives but it wont let me write to them and i cant format one of them to work right it is the drive of a creative muvo mp3 player and when i tried to configure it to work with linux it wont play song any more

[Alex Cavnar, aka alc6379]

Whoa, you're going to have to slow down there...

Let's lay down some ground ideas:

When you mount a drive, by default, only root can write to it. There are ways of changing the permissions, though. You'll have to edit the /etc/fstab file to do it, though.

Also, when you "format" the drive, you probably formatted it with ext2, the native Linux filesystem format. You'll want to format it with FAT, the standard MSDOS/Windows filesystem.

I would go in depth a little more about it, but if I did, I would probably lose you, as you are just starting out (no offense intended!). But, try doing a forum search for things like "thumb drive", "pen drive", and "flash drive", as most of those USB devices are just treated as USB mass storage devices by the Linux kernel.