quick question, ownership of a partition

jimjamjahaa · 02-02-2006, 05:32 AM

i am trying to set it um so that a 60 gig fat32 partition is mounted as /home, so that windows can access my work too. however when i try to adduser it fails because it cant set the ownership of /home/user to 1000:1000. so how do i set up my partition so that this will work. i am using debian or kubuntu to install, dont rly care

gilead · 02-02-2006, 06:16 AM

You can't do this on a fat32 partition - the fat32 file system doesn't support the same attributes as the Linux file systems. You can mount the fat32 partition somewhere else, put your data files there and create symbolic links (ln -s) in your home directory that point to the files on the fat32 partition.

jimjamjahaa · 02-02-2006, 09:04 AM

well, i beg to differ, because i have just done it :P

gilead · 02-02-2006, 12:46 PM

Did what? Got fat32 to store linux file system attributes?You can't use chown on a fat32 file system (even as root):

Code:

# chown martin:martin martin
chown: changing ownership of `martin': Operation not permitted

And you can't modify the permissions on a fat32 file system:

Code:

# ls -l
total 4
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 4096 2006-02-03 04:42 martin
root@fender:/mnt/dongle/home# chmod 0777 martin
root@fender:/mnt/dongle/home# ls -l
total 4
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 4096 2006-02-03 04:42 martin

What am I missing here? If you mount a fat32 partition at /home it shouldn't work. Did you mount it under your own home directory?