No write permission for /home/user/...
 

My fresh installation of Mandrake 10.1 ran for a couple of days but then suddenly began to give trouble. The last time I tried to boot, the system said sorry, it had "no write access to $home". Earlier I was unable to copy a file from a Win 98 partition to a sub-dir under /home/user/ without becoming root. There were references to "overriding mode 0755" and "I/O error 13". Acrobat reader refused to run because it could not create a sub-dir under /home/user/.

I have done nothing which I did not do in Mandrake 10.0. I haven't even installed all the software I had in that. Will someone please help me out of this pit of abysmal ignorance? Do bear in mind that I do not know how to change permissions or even how to log in as root.

sounds odd... who actually owns /home/user? make sure that the guid and uid for the directory do actually match your user if for some odd reason it's wrong, chown and/or chmod /home/user to match the required access.

the FAT32 things are normal... basically it's saying it's unable to set the right permissions on that file. this is because the file is on FAT32 and therefore has no way at all to make those settings take effect. FAT32 is "dumb"

There's just one user, acid_kewpie. On MDK 10.0 I never had any trouble reading from or writing to a FAT32 partition. Besides, I don't see how I can chown or chmod when I can't even get into MDK.