"When I Issue "chmod 644 /gerbil/etc/mtab" I got:
"permission denied"
I can not chown or chmod! - "permission denied""
I used one of my spare partitions to experiment with your problem. I issued the following commands:
/sbin/mkfs -t reiserfs /dev/hdg4
mount -t reiserfs /dev/hdg4 /spare3
mkdir /spare3/etc
touch /spare3/etc/mtb
ls -l /spare3/etc/mtb (permissions = 644)
chmod 000 /spare3/etc/mtb
ls -l /spare3/etc/mtb (permissions = 000)
chmod 644 /spare3/etc/mtb
ls -l /spare3/etc/mtb (permissions = 644)
I then went through the same commands again except that I formated and mounted /dev/hdg4 as ext2. I got exactly the same results as I got on reiserfs.
So I conclude that the permissions = 000 is not the problem which prevents you from changing the permissions. Perhaps the reiserfs inodes are bad. I suggest that you run fsck -t reiserfs against the partition and see what it tells you.
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Steve Stites