I am attempting to make a backup copy of a file, but every time I try to copy the file, I get a "permission denied error -- even when running as root.

The file is on a volume mounted as /media/Data . No problems reading/writing other files on the volume.

Here is the info on the file:
-rw-------. 1 root MailServer.img
I've tried chown but get the permission denied as well. This is a virtual machine image that runs fine, but even with the VM completely shut down, I get the same error.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

David

Please give the full ls -l MailServer.img output and getfacl MailServer.img output.

Also post the permissions/ownership on the source directory (and dest if not the same).

As requested:
From ls -l
-rw-------. 1 root root 697932185600 Jan 2 07:26 MailServer.img

from getfacl
# file: MailServer.img
# owner: root
# group: root
user::rw-
group::---
other::---

Thanks for the requested outputs

If ls -l works on the file then the containing directory's permissions should not affect copying the file.

I don't understand the . after the permissions list inCould it be significant?

Not working on any theories, just collecting information: what is the stat MailServer.img output?

Stat output:
File: `MailServer.img'
Size: 697932185600 Blocks: 31073632 IO Block: 4096 regular file
Device: 811h/2065d Inode: 12 Links: 1
Access: (0600/-rw-------) Uid: ( 0/ root) Gid: ( 0/ root)
Access: 2011-01-02 07:54:51.182361231 -0600
Modify: 2011-01-02 07:55:44.630400628 -0600
Change: 2011-01-02 07:56:41.261361047 -0600

No clues there. Because you wrote "No problems reading/writing other files on the volume" we have no reason to suspect the mount options. Might be worth running strace cp MailServer.img /dev/null for more (some!) clues or running fsck on the file system.

@catkin: "." mean that file has at least one acl set.
@OP: this directory is not NFS-mounted by any chance?

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I had problems copying and pasting files that were in a Win32 format on a drive of mine. To solve this problem I plugged it into a Windows machine, changed the permissions to Everyone and then it worked like a charm. That may help.

Thanks Valery

Good to learn about that ".". How does the presence of the . correlate with the gatfacl output in post #4 of this thread which looks the same as getfacl output on a system with no ACLs (I do not have a system with ACLs to test how it would look if ACL(s) were present).

Regards NFS, as long as dhamilton's "No problems reading/writing other files on the volume" is reliable do we have any reason to suspect that the problem lies at file system level? Whatever the problem is caused by it seems to be specific to this file. Clearly the file can be read or the VM that uses it would not run. That suggests something fine-grained like an ACL or the NTFS permissions that Bull3t wrote about.

I guess the VM might not be completely out of memory. Do a ps aux and confirm no VM processes are running. Then again repeat the chown/chmod commands and try copying. If u want to do a little testing create a dummy VM image and try copying it.