Ken Odlum:I still have not got Ubuntu to allow me to
write to an external device or the second hard drive yet and beging to
think that maybe it is not allowed on a linux system which makes
backups impossible.
Linux will certainly let you do all
that, if it is configured to do so! It's not clear what your problem
really is, but there are twothings which could be useful.
1. Execute the command
cat /etc/fstab
from
a terminal, and let us see what it says. There are clearly permission
problems involved here, and it may be that users other than "root" do
not have permissions set.
2. Ubuntu is a bit "weird" about how to
"become root". Most Linux distributions just let you log in as root
(with the root password set when the system was first set up). Ubuntu's
version is the "sudo" command. If you want to do stuff with root
privileges, you can execute to command
sudo -i
followed by
entering the root password. Then you are indeed logged in as root! You
can then fiddle with the stuff that root is allowed to fiddle with
(which "ordinary" users are not -- in that sense some things are "not
allowed" on a Linux system. It all goes back to the otiginal days when
Unix was first a multi-user operating system. You couldn't have
just any logged-in user playing with the structure of the system, so it
was organised so that only privileged people who knew the root password
could be the "superuser").
Hoping this helps!