chown problem
 

I have a partition in the fat32 filesystem which belongs to root:root. I tried to set a <user> as owner with the command: chown -R <user> /path/ but the output reads operation not permitted. Ofcourse I did this as a root.
Any suggestions?

fat32 is not built for permission compatibility. It is available to make sharing files between Linux and Windows easy.

Preset the permission in /etc/fstab. Search the forum for mounting windows filesystem and fstab.

I now formatted the partition to ext3. I am the owner of it, but I can't write to it, though I have all permissions.

It may be possible, but I've tried several times to chmod and chown files on a fat32 partition, and it always fails. I can read and even modify those files, but only as root. I can't by any means get regular user access, other than just to read. Infuriating by far.

Peace,
JimBass

What you need to understand is that the fat32 filesystem (win95/98) has no internal permission/ownership attributes (Beyond the old system/hidden/ro bits of 9x) . When you mount a fat32 (vfat) partition under linux, the entire mounted partion is collectively assigned linux attributes. As mentioned by chii-chan, this is controlled by fstab, and cannot be changed with chown/chmod, only by remounting the partition with other options.

Regards,
Kevin Alm

Make a new directory inside that new partition and then chown the directory to the user. You cannot write directly to the '/' (root) partition as a user (unless, maybe you change the fstab setting to enable that, maybe possible, not sure about that) with default setting.