Changing group on usb disk/pendrive

Graham_R · 12-06-2006, 11:29 AM

Hello

I am using Fedora 6 and it works fine, except that when I use an external disk the group is always set to root and it can't be changed, neither can the perms.

I get this at cmd line

[root@Strangeness media]# chgrp newgrp MATRON/
chgrp: changing group of `MATRON/': Operation not permitted

Not really a problem until I want to use rsync - which fails because it needs to change the perms/group temporarily.

Any help would be really good

Thanks

Graham

Wells · 12-06-2006, 03:07 PM

Since this is Fedora6, I am assuming that the pendrive is being automounted when you plug it in. As such, I am sure that there is a setting somewhere amongst the automount settings that also sets the group ownership of the drive when it mounts.

Unfortunately, I don't really know how Fedora handles pendrive mountings these days, so beyond that I am pretty much useless without installing Fedora 6 on a box myself and playing with it for a little while.

Emmanuel_uk · 12-07-2006, 06:43 AM

Quote:

set to root and it can't be changed, neither can the perms.

irrespective of the automount system, as root nothing should stop you to change grps etc, unless you have mounted the drive read only

As a temp fix you could type commands as root (once drive mounted)
mount
cat /etc/fstab
and get inspired to mount manually the drive somewhere else

You may want to look at the /mnt permissions

Not using fc5 either. In MDV level of security affects the mounting of usb drive.

Graham_R · 12-07-2006, 06:45 AM

Hiya Wells

It looks like the problem is that it is formatted as windoze partition, vfat has no notion of groups/ownership etc and so it cannot be changed. ntfs will have the same problem I am told. It would be good if fedora had covered this problem by allowing it at a local level to allow rsync etc to run - perhaps in the next release....

I tried mounting manually and I get the same problem so it looks like reformatting to ext3 will be the solution.

Thanks again

Graham

Emmanuel_uk · 12-07-2006, 06:58 AM

excellent your post saying what you find out

Quote:

windoze partition, vfat

In your interest in the future try to give as much details as possible, if you had posted the result of mount we would straight away "said vfat", forget about it. Just see it as a learning point

my.dying.bride · 12-07-2006, 09:48 AM

Group permissions on vfat can be changed when mounting but not when mounted. I use vfat a lot so i have edited fstab , changed gid=0 to some other group number X , which in turn gives group X write permissions. This can also be done by mount -t vfat .. command with gid=X as an option. (of course unmount usb drive first or use remount option)