unable to change pen drive file permission

linuxmandrake · 08-29-2006, 01:49 AM

I am using ubuntu 6 but for some strange reason it wont let me change permission. Even if I am root within the terminal. The command would succeed but it wont change the permission,. The pen drive is formatted as VFAT. I have a feeling it's not supposed to work but then how can I write to my pen as a normal user. IT was dected automatically and a usb icon appeared in the places menu hence I mounted it that way

salparadise · 08-29-2006, 03:22 AM

I had a similar experience and got round it by reformatting the USB stick using Windows. Probably not the most elegant of solutions, but it worked.

binary_y2k2 · 08-29-2006, 12:12 PM

mount the drive with pmount (or pmount-hal)

Code:

pmount /dev/sdX

where sdX is the device

You need to mount it as the user you want to be able to write to it. You could do this with mount options (like uid=username).
The reason you can't change permissions is because (as you thought) vfat doesn't support permissions, it's just a limitation of FAT.
If you mount the device a lot, then you may consider adding a line to /etc/fstab for it. But that will only work if the device always has the same name in /dev