FAT32 shared drive lacks user write access
 

Hello out there in linux land,

I'm not a complete newb, been using linux since Redhat 5.1 but I haven't done much administration. I recently set up a fedora Core 2/winxp home dual boot on a friend's/co-workers laptop, he's going on a trip and needs to run some unix software my group wrote but needs to be able to use the data it produces from windows (he's a geologist who's not very computer oriented). Tech support will take 2 weeks to get to it, he's leaving at the end of this week, so it fell to me to get it done in a timely fashion. After I installed fedora on his computer I decided to upgrade my personal computer at home from redhat 9.0, and when I went to transfer the files I wanted to MY shared drive I had to be root to do so. After I installed fedora I still had the same problem. As root I was unable to give my user account write access to the shared drive, I tried chmod, chown, chgrp, usermod and it doesn't work, chown and chgrp said it was unable to change ownership of the files on the drive. I'm really at a loss here and I'm fairly certain the co-workers going to have the same problem but doesn't know it yet. I've got to meet with him again to install more software on his laptop (he uses it for work so I can't keep it until I have it working) and I'd like to have a solution when I do.

does anyone out there know how to fix this? I know it's possible because tech support gave users in my department write access to the shared drive on our dual boot machines, but I just don't have the time for them to get back to me on this.

I could really really really use some help on this one.

-Abijah

I would change the entry in '/etc/fstab'. So that way it gets mounted with the proper permissions upon bootup...

That always works. Leave the last 2 columns that ussually contain "0 0" blank. umask=0 goes where you would find "noauto,ro,owner" and whatnot..... Or you could just take out "owner" and write "user" in it's place.

You can't use chown or chgrp on mounted windows partitiions, but you can add a uid= or gid= option to the /etc/fstab entry. Non-linux native partitions tend to have these options. Consult the mount man page for details.

Changing the group ownership of a windows partition and making certain users members of that group is a way of controlling access to that drive.