solarian Posted February 16, 2006 Report Share Posted February 16, 2006 (edited) Hi! I have a mounted FAT partition at /mnt/fat and the ownership of that dir after a fresh Mandriva install is root All would be good, but, when I try (as root) to change the ownership to user, it doesn't allow me that. It doesn't even allow me to change permissions with chmod too!! [root@localhost fat]# chown username /mnt/fat chown: changing ownership of `/mnt/fat': Operation not permitted When I try to do this through Konqueror I get this -> Could not modify the ownership of file /mnt/fat. You have insufficient access to the file to perform the change. If I copy a file from /mnt/fat to another partition, I can change the permissions and ownership with no problems then, but I can not do that while the file is located in /mnt/fat Edited February 16, 2006 by solarian Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted February 16, 2006 Report Share Posted February 16, 2006 Is this while /mnt/fat has something mounted on it? Or did you try with it unmounted and it failed? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
solarian Posted February 16, 2006 Author Report Share Posted February 16, 2006 It's a mounted FAT filesystem partition with data (my backups) on it Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted February 16, 2006 Report Share Posted February 16, 2006 If you unmount it, and then change the permissions on the /mnt/fat directory, does it make it work any better when you remount it again afterwards? Just a thought..... edit: One other thing I noticed when using Gentoo once, was that I had problems accessing an ntfs filesystem once and it was due to incorrect entries in /etc/fstab which was stopping me from doing something. It could be this also, if some settings aren't set correctly here, which are preventing you to gain access. Although in my case, I could always access it as root, I just could never do it as a normal user until I modified /etc/fstab. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
solarian Posted February 16, 2006 Author Report Share Posted February 16, 2006 Thanks for the suggestion, I'll try mounting/unmounting it. ========== That's strange, I get "error unmounting /mnt/fat device or resource busy" I'll try it sometime later after a restart. If all fails I'll just backup my backups (meh_) and reformat the partition to ext3 (there's a long story why it's a fat) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted February 16, 2006 Report Share Posted February 16, 2006 FAT doesn't support ownership and I think it inherits for the purpose of linux the owner of the mount point ... or the user who mounts it (in fstab) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow Posted February 16, 2006 Report Share Posted February 16, 2006 Yep, just umount it, change your etc/fstab so it would be mounted at startup by user, and then remount it... You cannot set file/folder ownership on vfat or ntfs filesystems. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
solarian Posted February 16, 2006 Author Report Share Posted February 16, 2006 Yep, just umount it, change your etc/fstab so it would be mounted at startup by user, and then remount it...You cannot set file/folder ownership on vfat or ntfs filesystems. How do I set it to be mounted by user? This is my fstab entry /dev/hdc1 /mnt/fat vfat umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850 0 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted February 16, 2006 Report Share Posted February 16, 2006 This is from my CD-ROM line, but you can see the format: /dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom auto umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850,noauto,ro,exec,users 0 0 I think it's the users just before the 0 0 at the end you need to add. I know you're not mounting CD-ROM, but the format still applies, at least I'm pretty sure it does. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tyme Posted February 16, 2006 Report Share Posted February 16, 2006 "users" allows for any user to mount it. "user" allows any user to mount it, but sets the user who mounts it in mtab so that only that user can unmount it. here's the relevant manpage info on the two: user Allow an ordinary user to mount the file system. The name of the mounting user is written to mtab so that he can unmount the file system again. This option implies the options noexec, nosuid, and nodev (unless overridden by subsequent options, as in the option line user,exec,dev,suid). users Allow every user to mount and unmount the file system. This option implies the options noexec, nosuid, and nodev (unless overridden by subsequent options, as in the option line users,exec,dev,suid). 'man fstab' will explain things further. here's my line for my fat fs (this is an external usb drive): /dev/sda1 /media/VANTEC vfat user,exec,noauto,noatime 0 0 as you can see i have the "user" flag. noauto means it doesn't mount on boot. it's best to not mount windows partitions at boot and do it manually when you need it, imho. this way you don't go accidental borking your windows system (or, someone else doesn't bork it for you) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
solarian Posted February 16, 2006 Author Report Share Posted February 16, 2006 There is no Windows system, just a FAT filesystem partition. I now mounted it as user and everything is ok, thanks for advices. Maybe I'll convert it to ext3 later. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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