Hi there

I'm using the WD My Book Essential 500GB but can't create a symbolic link. This is what I get:

kostas@KostasD:/media/My Book/$ /bin/ln -sf /path/fname .
ln: creating symbolic link `./fname' to `/home/kostas/fname': Operation not permitted

Same result when I use sudo. The manufacturer doesn't claim compatibility with linux but it mounted automatically and seemed to work fine. Also in the HCL of qbik comment says "Working flawlessly on Linux 2.6.17". (http://www.qbik.ch/usb/devices/showdev.php?id=4199)

I'm using Ubuntu 7.10 with an AMD64 Athlon X2 dual processor and this is the output of uname -a

Linux KostasD 2.6.22-14-generic #1 SMP Tue Feb 12 02:46:46 UTC 2008 x86_64 GNU/Linux

So I have 2 questions:
How can I create symbolic links in there?
Since the data I plan to store there are very valuable to me do you think that it might be risky to use this disk? I mean I just bought the disk and it already behaves strange...

I'm assuming the partition(s) on the drive are formatted FAT32, in which case you can't create symbolic links as FAT32 doesn't support them. If you want to use symlinks, you'll need to use a file system that supports them.

Thank you for responding Nylex

I guess it's time to use the command mount. This the output (only one line)

/dev/sdc1 on /media/My Book type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,shortname=mixed,uid=1000,utf8,umask=077,usefree)

I guess that the disk's filesystem is called vfat and it doesn't support ln command. So now what? Can I change the disk's filesystem just like that? And what about the data already stored in it. And will it mount again just like that? I don't know much as you can see. Maybe we should move this post to the newbie category

FAT is a filesystem format, just like NTFS is, EXT3, etc etc.

FAT is a very old filesystem which I believe originated with DOS. Both Linux & Windows can read/write to this filesystem, but both OS's are somewhat crippled in it.

If you go NTFS, then Linux will have a hard time writing to it. If you go EXT3 (etc) then Windows will have a hard time writing to it.

However, to do the switch, you much re-format the entire drive, will result in 100% data loss, so make sure you backup what's on that drive!