How to Remount a Drive as Read/Write in Linux

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2013-06-08

Sometimes you end up with a storage drive mounted with read-only access in Linux. Here is how you can remount it with read and write access so that you can make changes to files on it (create new ones and delete others):

sudo mount -o remount,rw /

In this command the -o flag is for options, the remount option tells mount to remount the the partition with different options and the rw option means that it will be mounted with read and write access. The / part is the mount point of the partition, being the root in this example.

You can check out your mounted partitions with the df command:

magnatecha@d64:~$ df 
Filesystem     1K-blocks     Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1       73840300 57696476  12445444  83% /
udev             2050688        4   2050684   1% /dev
tmpfs             823192      908    822284   1% /run
none                5120        0      5120   0% /run/lock
none             2057972     4188   2053784   1% /run/shm