I am using Fedora core 1, my Windows 98 partition is mounted on my system during bootup under mnt/win98.

Only root is allowed to write and execute files on it. I want my regular user account (shara)to be able to write and execute on it. Right now my regular account can only read from it.

I've tried changing the permissions via chmod and chown(when logged on as root), but I keep being told "Operation not permitted". Why is this? Isn't root susposed to be able to change everything?

BTW, root is the owner and group of my win98 partition.

Could it be that I mounted it improperly? The line I used in fstab is:

/dev/hda1 /mnt/win98 msdos 0 0

hi,

as far as i'm aware, writing to windows partitions is potentially dodgy - certainly writing to nfs filesystems is highly risky, and i think writing to fat partitions is also discouraged..

check the man pages for mount and fstab and see what the options are.

being somewhat nervous of screwing up my windows filesystem, what i've done on my machine is to set up a small(ish!) ext2 partition (my main linux fs is reiser 3). if i need to share data between windows and linux, i copy the files into said partition and then use a great little windows app called 'ltools', which can read linux ext2 partitions...

hope this helps a bit..

I do know that NTFS is risky to write to, so I won't even try.

I was under the impression that FAT32 was safe to write to under Linux.

try adding these otions to fstab:
Unless the partition is FAT16 use vfat instead of msdos, they both work on fat32 but vfat has some extra options.
And yea writing to FAT32 is safe.
Keep in mind that this allows every user to have full access the partition, so it may not be a good idea on a multi-user system, though fat32 is unsafe to begin with.

When you mount it you can specify the owner and group permissions to assign it

try something like

mount -t vfat /dev/windows -o uid=user,gid=user /windows

substituting /dev/windows for your user device, your username for user and where you wna tot mount it for /windows.

This will also work for reading NTFS partitions, but you still won't be able to right to it. You can add umask=0077 to the options if you don't want other users to access the mounted partition.

Thanks Demonbane, that did the trick!