write permissions for windoze hd, mounted on linux hd are not cooperating
 

Goal: to access, read and write to windoze hd files from linux xterm session.

environment:
2 harddrives: hda linux FD-4, hdb windoze Me
/etc/fstab mounts the Me hd on linux filesystem
from xterm, can cd to files, open them (read-only).
I knowI have a permissions oversight, but don't understand how to overwrite windoze protection (am I right? is it windoze that's stopping me?).
I can su and chmod 777 the windoze filename from an xterm and linux tells me the permissions are now rwxrwxrwx, but when I do a ls -l, permissions are unchanged rwxr-xr-x.

Thanks in advance.

lets see
fdisk -l (check out what those partitions actually are)
/etc/fstab (to see what instructions are going in there)
ls -al <where the mountpoints are> (for eg, I have a win partition mounted at /mnt/winc so I would do: ls -al /mnt)

I've run into similar things where I have been unable to chmod or chown mounted volumes to anything different.

can you post the EXACT output (including prompt to ensure you are root) of the following commands:

- cat /etc/fstab
- ls -l fileName
- chmod 777 fileName
- ls -l fileName

Is the drive NTFS? If so write support in Linux is still experimental, and probably won't work. This inability to write would be why you can't change your permissions, and just read the files.

Regards,

Alunduil

alunduil: you'll see from the first post that permissions could not be moved from rwxr-xr-x. Clearly the fs type should be established. However, write support for ntfs is only unavailable in the native ntfs driver - there is always captive, as well as a variety of commercial offerings, to fill the gap. Write support is quite mature - though not complete (ntfs encrypted files are not supported).

i was going to ask that too, but i noticed he said windows ME.. ntfs isnt supported in ME.. unless 3rd party software is used.

... that I didn't know. Mostly I treasure my ignorance of windows :D

It seems from the first post that it is vfat - but we do not know for sure that this is a virgin (win) install. You can end up in all sorts of mess if someone else has been at it before you that we don't know about.

this is probably just an issue of umask not being set in the /etc/fstab. This has usually been the case for most people who asked this question in the past. I guess we will know for sure when wantabee posts what we asked ;)

regards,
...drkstr

Yup, that's exactly what's supposed to happen. The Windows filesystem doesn't support Linux file permissions. You can't change the permissions on the individual files. All you can do is change the default permissions that are applied to the entire filesystem. To do that, add something like "umask=0000" to the options section of the partition's /etc/fstab entry. That will make all the files writable to everyone. You can read about the various options in the "mount" man page.

Hi Everyone ~
I want to thank you all up front. I really appreciate the support.
Ok, first off, windoze Me is in fact vfat.
It will take a couple more hours before I can run the cmds as requested
above. I will do that tonight, and report back if successful. If not, will list the EXACT responses.
Thanks again!!

YES, YES, YES!!!!! umask=0000 Scores!!
Thank you SO much.
I was tromping down the 'rw' path.
Way tooooooooooooo easy, cool! Thanks.