I'm not sure what has happened, but I've all of a sudden lost write access to any of my NTFS external drives.

I installed a few games and apps from the software center, and now I can't make new folders or copy and paste files to anything that is NTFS. Everything is now read only, and I've tried so many things to fix it, but it seems hopeless.

Just to check if it wasn't the drives themselves, I made a little ntfs formatted truecrypt volume, and a fat formatted volume. And yes, it seems that Ubuntu is blocking me from writing anything to NTFS.

What happened here?

Whats a way I can simply get write access to my NTFS drives, so I can just backup all my stuff.

I'll probably reinstall Ubuntu. Please help.

UPDATE (and thanks everyone for their quick replies)

The problem has been solved.

Prior to noticing that I had lost NTFS write permission, I had installed GParted from the software center, and there was an extension called ntfsprogs that came with it.

During my search for a solution to the problem, I uninstalled GParted (as that was one of the apps I installed just before the problem). But that did not solve the problem.

I came across an app called 'NTFS Configuration Tool'. When I installed this, it said that the ntfsprogs extension needed to be removed (so I guess uninstalling GPARTED, didn't remove the ntfsprog extension).

I launched the NTFS Configuration Tool and now I have write access to NTFS drives. Unfortunately, I didn't check if I had write permission prior to launching the NTFS Configuration Tool, so I'm not sure whether the NTFS Configuration Tool, or the un-installation of ntfsprog gave me back NTFS write permission.

Hopefully if another newbee encounters this problem, they'll come across this page and know what to do.