chmod/chown does not work on windows partition

anix · 10-01-2008, 01:21 PM

Hello,
I have a dual boot with XP and Fedora 9.
I downloaded some files with azureus onto my windows NTFS drive and everything works well on this (linux) end - I obviously can write to it and I can read and write as any user.
In windows, I was able to open the folder once. When I tried opening a file, it said I did not have permission to access the file. After that, I tried to look at the access privileges in windows, and now I cant even open the folder. I thought maybe it somehow had root-only access in linux, so I went to see - everything looked fine, but just in case I tried

Code:

[anix@Anix]$ su -c 'chmod 775 ./witcher'

(witcher is the folder.)
It worked, but I still couldn't access the files in windows. So I tried

Code:

[anix@Anix]$ su -c 'chown -R anix ./witcher'

It looked like it took, but when i looked at the privileges it was the still owned by root, just like every other object in the folder.
Since, I have tried actually logging in as root and changing it graphically. When I try to change ownership it flashes from root to anix but then immediately goes back to root. That also happens for group.
Any ideas?

indienick · 10-01-2008, 01:40 PM

I don't know the details about the ntfs-3g driver and Linux-to-Windows permissions conversions, and I am fairly certain Windows and Linux have two, drastically different ways of handling permissions.

In Windows, try modifying the files from an administrator account (right-click, Properties) and checking the permissions there, instead of messing around with them in Linux.

If you have trouble reading the files as a normal user, it is a problem with the options passed to "mount" when the drive is mounted, NOT a problem with the individual file permissions.

In your /etc/fstab file, locate your Windows drive, and set the following in the options section:

Code:

defaults,umask=022

So, it might look something like this:

Code:

Device Node  Mount Point     Filesystem  Options             Dump  Check
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/dev/hdxN    /media/windows  ntfs-3g     defaults,umask=022  0     0

This will allow any non-root users read-only permission.