Changing file ownership on Fat32 drives
 

Hi Everybody!

In my System, there is an old FAT32-formatted hdd running for filesharing-use. It is mounted vfat defaults 1 1.
I tried changing the ownership of the files on that disk with chown and -even as root- got the error message operation not permitted

What Do I have to change, so the files belong to nobody and can easilier be rw-shared with samba???

fat 32 files don't have permissions... that's a linux/unix/bsd thing. when you write a file to a fat32 partition from windows, linux treats the file as a fat32 file, not linux file... thus, no permissions.

true. still- If I want to have rw-access via Samba I need to set the guest account in smb.conf to root. And I guess thats not the way to do it.

Any Suggestions except reformatting in any Unix FS?

you gotta change /etc/fstab on the remote machine. it's not a samba thing (took me ages to find that out!). My fstab line says:

/dev/hda1 /windows vfat user,umask=000 0 0
/dev/hdb1 /mp3 vfat umask=000 0 0

This is WRONG tho!!! and i don't quite know what the EXACT right options are, the umask=000 makes all files writeable etc.. to everyone, but i still have various problems writing to them from win98...

Can someone define the definitive options required for this? please?

chris
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Thanx for the tip. It worked fine for me. although I only set umask=111 so the executable flag is not set.

my line reads like this:

/dev/hdg1 /windows/C rw,nouser,auto,umask=111 0 0

probably the drive wasn't mounted rw by default?

What kind of problems are you experiencing??

I get problems such as when i untar an archive onto a fat32 drive, i get lots of permision denieds, and cannot create link problems (i think that's what they were...). Pretty vague.... I'll change my settings to your ones, and see if it's any better...

Chris
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Hi There!

I thought about it a bit and probably this is the solution:

Since FAT32 doesn't support ownership of files tar will have a problem setting the correct properties. You should get the same errors using chmod or chown.

So: Don't worry about the errors. If those are important files you should be aware that any user can access and modify them!

hehe, thanks. I'll try and remember that all otehr others users can do that...!

Other users, however in my case is erm... my girlfriend sometimes, to check her email!

chris
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