I want to share hdb1 which is mounted at /storage with all the users, ie read and write data as well. right now these are the permissions:
drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 16384 Dec 31 1969 storage

I can only read right now and i cannot change the permissions of the folder even as root, how do i share this drive with all the users?

You need to set the 'other' to read and write.

Theres two options.

1) Allow every user to read/write/remove, they can remove any file, even if they did not make it. You do this just by setting other read and write flags like:
chmod -R o+rwx /storage

2) Allow every user to read/write, no one but the superuser (or a member of a group that is giving remove privileges) can remove files, you do this with t. Like:

chmod -R o+rwt /storage

Notice we changed x with a t, t is the sticky bit which stops file removal.

Hope that helps,
Andrew

I have tired this, i don't have permission to do this even as root. I get an Operation not permitted, i think this has to do with the fact that it is mounted hard disk.

$df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda5 4.9G 3.0G 2.0G 61% /
tmpfs 507M 4.0K 507M 1% /dev/shm
/dev/hda7 4.0G 37M 4.0G 1% /home
/dev/hdb1 149G 36G 114G 24% /storage
/dev/hda1 9.4G 7.6G 1.8G 82% /mnt/winxp

Umount the disk before changing permissions on the mount point.
Also, make sure it's being mounted with read/write permission for users.

Im sorry, forgot to tell you to umount it first... and mount rw.


Andrew

it worked! i had to add umask=000 in fstab and it did the trick. Thanks guys.