I have an old HD drive that used to have a dual boot Linux/Windows installation on it. I recently added the drive to a Linux installation that I wanted to use for experimenting with Samba. I was hoping that I could use the old Windows vfat partition as a Samba share.

But, I am finding that I cannot change the permissions on the old vfat shares so that a low level Samba client can write to the share. I've tried a variety of different mount options and switches and it makes no difference. I keep getting "Operation not permmited" messages whenever I try using chmod to allow others to write to that directory or those files where the partition is mounted.

I thought maybe that there was a permissions set under Windows that is causing the problem. But I can no longer boot to that installation, so that would not be a solution.

Does anyone have any idea what the problem here is?

You cannot change permissions on a Windows partition since vfat/fat32 does not support the Linux permissions.

Add umask etc. to your /etc/fstab

i.e.

/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat rw,auto,user,umask=0 0 0

That did it!

Thank you very much. You would think such a fundamental problem might be more transparently solved. But, that is Linux.