I am running Mandrake 9.1 and dual booting Windows XP. This started out fine and I am sharing a large partition between them (/storage/ for linux and G:\ for Windows XP). As I said, I had no problems at first and was able to view and change files in both, but now, only windows can freely do so. Linux has rwx for root and r-- for group and others. I have tried to change the permissions using:

# chmod -R 777 /storage/

But I get the error message: Operation not permitted. This is true for all the files in /storage/ and /storage/ folder it's self. I have also tried (just to see if it would work) to change the ownership of /storage/ to ryan (my user name) using the command:

# chown -R ryan /storage/

Still no results. I believe it MAY have something to do with my fstab, but I don't see anything that would indicate the permissions problem. Of course, i'm new to this and probably wouldn't notice the problem if it punched me in the face. The related line in the fstab file is as follows:

/dev/hda6 /storage vfat user,fs=auto,iocharset=iso8859-1,dev,codepage=850,exec 0 0

Hope the information helps. I'd love to get rid of Windows completely but it is required for some of my needed programs (Macromedia Dreamweaver and Flash) I realize that these work with wine, but not perfectly. I love wine but it doesn't do everything. Thanks for any help.

change the fstab entry to
/dev/hda6 /storage vfat user,fs=auto,iocharset=iso8859-1,dev,codepage=850,exec,umask=0 0 0

notice the umask option.

i am not sure if you would get the file mounted if this is the problem or not but are you sure that the partition is not ntfs. if it is ntfs then your kernel may not be able to edit it's info. have you updated or recompiled your kernel lately??

you can't run chmod or chown on ms file systems because they don't have those features in the file system - that's why the chonw and chmod fail. The permissions have to be set in fstab (or as options in the mount command). Whoever mounts the file system is going to 'own' the files in an vfat or ntfs file system.

correct me if i am wrong but i was under the impression that linux permissions were only recognized by the linux system. i mean when you mount them thru the fstab then the ownership is assigned but when you boot to windows the same ownership is not there, that is as long as the two usernames aren't the same. did i say that in an intelligible way? anyway i think that what i am trying to get at is that i even if he is so and so user that owns the /storage folder then even root should be able to change the permissions and or owner/group. doing so does nothing to the actual files only the way that the linux system looks at them.

p.s. forgive me if i didn't make any sense. i am working a mid shift at work and i don't do well in the thinking department when working mids.

no one can change the ownership and permissions on vfat/ntfs partitions because those file systems don't support that feature - you can't change something that isn't there. That's why the permissions have to be done from fstab - and whoever mounts it 'owns' all the files.

It's a Fat, and I'll change the fstab to what you suggested quatsch thanks. I'll let you all know if if works out. I do know about the NTFS thing, what a pain in the ass that was to figure out.....