Need help with an 80 GB external drive
 

I have an external 80GB external drive that I reformatted from FAT32 to ext3. After I would get done using G-Parted, I would unplug it then plug it back in to so I can transfer about 38GB of music on it. Well, it keeps on saying in the permissions "the permission of "disk-2" could not be determined."

I am trying to give it permissions so that way I can got to Macs and oter Linux machines and access and write to it.

Any help?

I don't know about using disks on Macintoshes. This is what I do to establish the ownership of a file system mounted on a specific directory.
1. Create the mount point.
2. Mount the partition.
3. Use chown and chmod to set the permissions the way that I want them.

Example: Let's say that you have an external disk partition /dev/sdc1. You want to create a mount point at /mnt/sdc1 and set the permissions. Note you either have to do this logged on as root or by using sudo in front of each command.
You only have to do that one time. After that you can just use the mount command to mount the file system.

Ok it did work. I was able to get rid of the lost and found file. But when I check the permissions in the properties it still says it can determine the permissions. I am able to drag and drop files but not right click and paste.

Sorry I was gone. My house is a victim of the New England ice storm. I'm living in a Red Cross refugee camp right now. I just got an AT&T 3G modem today so that I can get back on the Internet.

We know that your permissions are okay because you could delete the lost+found directory. The question then becomes what are you using to drag and drop or cut and paste. This must somehow be related to the application that you are using. Maybe the window manager, maybe the clip board.

What exactly to you do to get the error message? Which application; what keystrokes; and most importantly what is the exact error message? Include all punctuation and anything else that will tell us what utility is generating the error message.

:)

Lost and Found is a directory. It is owned by root, so it sounds like you were able to delete it because you did so as root.

It would be easier to use your username and primary groupname instead of using your uid & gid. Or use the "id" program to display your uid & gid. Post 2 assumed that those where your values. For SuSE, the uid of the first user would be 1000, but for Mandriva or Fedora core, it would be 500.
By the way, what is your uid and default gid. It was assumed in post #2 to be 1000 and 100.
Run "id". And look at the permissions of the mounted directory:
example:
ls -ld /mnt/sdc1

Does it indicate your username and primary group?

Try to create a file there, e.g.: touch /mnt/sdc1/testfile

You could come up with a more descriptive name for the mount point than /mnt/sdc1 if you want.

Good Luck!

It wouldn't be owned by root if he did the chown command. There's no harm in removing that directory. The next fsck will recreate it.

I recommended the numeric values because the user account name was not posted and I figured I'd save a round of q&a by using the most common values. Regrettably, as is too often the case, the OP did not list their/his/her distribution. It was a calculated risk that obviously worked.

Well its fixed now, I am able to move things by copy and paste

Except, I don't know if your example uid & gid were correct in his case. And he may have done them logged in as root, as was your first suggestion.

But yes, please DeadlySniper, put enough details of your distro in your profile. That will help if you need to post another question in the future. There are some differences between distros.

Actually there are differences between different Windows versions as well.

thank you.