can't change directory permissions
 

I dual boot sarge/win2k. I share a fat32 partition which I use for data including email. Problem is, I can only access this partition as root. chmod and chown just wont work. Of course I try to run those comands as root.

Here is the directory:
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ls - lsd
32 drwxr--r-- 15 root root 32768 Dec 31 1969 /data
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Here is the /etc/fstab entry:
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/dev/hda6 /data vfat defaults,user 0 0
------------------

Any ideas?

/dev/hda6 /data vfat umask=0,quiet,user 0 0

Seems to work, thank you.

i just found the same problem, but mine is rwxr-xr-x. may we have to log on as root and change the permissions

First of all: Fat or FAT32 does not support permissions or files owner. So you can not use chmod or chown command. Permissions, what you see is done by masking certain bits with umask option at mount.

So you can use option:
umask=0 for masking 0 bits
gid - default group
uid - default user
quiet - not report any error (it's useful for midnight commander, it'll eliminate errors caused by copying (respectively doing chmod command after copy))

Vookimedlo, thanks for explaining what the quiet option does in practice. I also use mc and I've wondered about the error messages.

One question though, the man page for mount says that user option implies noexec, nosuid, and nodev. Now, does this mean that I should add the exec option to fstab if I want to execute windows binaries using wine?

I don't know exactly because I don't use Wine. But here is my opinion. I think that exec is irrelevant for windows binary format since kernel doesn't have support to get run such files.

So you have to use something like: wine program
and it doesn't matter if exec or noexec is defined. the file is normally read by wine program.

What do you think about it?

Makes sense to me. :D

I had some Wine-related problems earlier when trying to launch programs from ntfs partition but I think they were due to umask, uid, and gid settings. Now Wine seems to work as expected (without exec option in fstab). I'll try the fstab line you suggest above when I'll have access to a computer that dual boots between Debian and vfat partition.