Problems mounting Fat32
 

Hi I am having some mounting problems. I have 3 partitions, One is a linux, one is NTFS, and the other is FAT32. I have windows installed on NTFS and suse installed on the LINUX w/ swap FS. I have an apache webserver on windows and the web files are stored on the Fat 32 partition. Now when I run suse I have the server set up so that it will read the contents from the fat 32 as well. The problem that I am having is that I am getting permission error with some of my scripts. I tried to set the permissions on this partition from the drives:/ (right click permissions) but I get an error stating that it can perform this opperation. I read somewhere that fat 32 has to modes read and not read so I don't know if this is why I can't set the permissions or what. Any suggestions?

You can set permissions for FAT32 drives with the umask parameter in /etc/fstab. umask=000 will set full permissions on all files for all users. You can also change the user/group of the partition by using 'uid='/'gid='.

Sorry for the late reply!! So if I go to that directory and do what you stated, I should have have full access to everything. Can I specify individual file and folder permissions as well? I noticed the directory that you told me to goto would be located on the linux partition, how will modifying something on the linux partition give me certain privalages to what is on the fat 32 FS.

As you know, a partition needs to be 'mounted' to gain access to its data. This mounting is either performed manually with the 'mount' command, or done by the system, using the information in /etc/fstab. This is why a parameter in /etc/fstab can influence the partition that is mounted.
The problem with FAT32 is that it does not 'know' specific user permissions. Everyone who has access to the computer has access to the files. Linux filesystems however, use a permissions system that distinguishes between the owner, group and the rest of the world's users. The umask paramter in /etc/fstab tells Linux how to interpret the data on the FAT32 partition. It sets a mask for the whole partition. Unfortunately this does not allow the modification of single files and folders. You can only change the permissions of the entire partition.

so could I think of mounting as a pointer. The current pointer says that I only have access to read Fat32 so now I need to tell the "pointer" to read and write.


Thanks for your help.

In a way, yes. Mostly the problem occurs when a FAT32 drive is mounted through /etc/fstab with the default values. The defaults allow read and write access, but give access only to the user that has mounted the drive. And this is root. So you have two options to change that:

1. mount as another user. This is done with the parameter uid=<your user id>
2. still mount as root (default), but give write access to all users. umask=0 will do this.

Have fun with Linux!