I'm new to Linux but have a little experience with it, using UBUNTU 11.04, I have an external 1TB USB HDD mounted to this computer which is running dual boot with Windows7. The HDD is formatted FAT32 and I've set the share options but the permissions for allowing others to access it say NONE and cannot be changed. my other UBUNTU 11.04 computer can see the ShareName that I set for my HDD and even individual files on my usb HDD that I've shared but it is unable to access them. Error recieved: unable to mount location - Failed to mount windows share. I formatted a thumbdrive to ext3 and was able to change permissions and my other computer accesses it just fine.

Other Threads seem close to this but not quite the same thing, in my research FSTAB is not for removable data and I am unfamiliar with how to run CHMOD 777, I don't know what it does, and have heard that it doesn't fix my issue anyways

You say it is mounted.

What happens when you unmount and remount it?

FAT32 does not support permissions and the mounting problem might be because not the right drivers are installed.

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Are you sure that it is formatted Fat32? If it is NTFS (very common with Windows) then you will need to install from your repositories ntfs-3g in order to access it. Like this:
apt-get install ntfs-3g

I'm using Mint 10, which is very similar to your Ubuntu, and have no difficulty accessing either Fat32, or NTFS on a USB drive.

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Try doing a gksudo nautilus to manage the permissions on the drive. Be careful and be sure of what your doing. I have done this in the past
sometimes when switching distros.

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First, you were curious about chmod. chmod CHanges file MODes. The file 'mode' is usually called permissions, and is whether it is readable, writeable, or executable (ie. if you can run it as a program, or if the execute permission is set on a directory, whether you can set it as your current directory). You also have the user who owns the file and its group.

I suspect that the files on the drive are set not to be readable by anyone other than the logged-in-user (and probably their group) when the drive is plugged in and the machine turned on. The machine trying to use the drive accesses it as the user/group depending on what your machine is set up to allow them to use, which is failing because it that user is not you.

You can set the USB disk to be mounted to be readable by everyone (not sure how to do this in the GUI, but adding options to an entry in fstab for the drive would allow it - may need to create a permanent entry which the system should use again each time). This obviously is less secure. Or you can make the USB drive mounted by a group/user that both of you can read/write as appropriate. Not sure what user the remote computer is accessing it as - is there an equivalent local user on your machine? Or maybe its accessing it as a general network-share 'guest' or equivalent anonymous user (if so, you probably dont want to open up the drive to be accessed by guest cos then anyone at all on the network could do the same read/write).

Sorry for not providing easy command lines or places to change in config files/a user-interface step-through, but I think thats the basics of how to make it do what you want.

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Just a guess. If the "immutable" flag is set not even root can change permissions or delete the file. Take a look at man chattr and man lsattr. So look with lsattr /path/dir_or_file. If you see an "i" in the first field, that's what stops you. I think ls -l /path/file may also show this. chmod is good to know as well. chmod 775 will give -rwxrwxr-x perms. If this is a directory x perms are needed to cd into the dir. Hope this helps.

---------- Post added 07-01-11 at 01:09 PM ----------

Oops, remember. Everything in linux is a file.

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Many distros have a user permission or privileges to allow access to removable storage.

See this page about half way down.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Mount/USB

Blue_Ice is right. Please stop trying to help w/ a problem that is inherent in the M$ file system & cannot be "fixed".

Please let's concentrate on this real problem.