[SOLVED] Changing ownership of USB 'Not Permitted' Why?
Linux - NewbieThis Linux forum is for members that are new to Linux.
Just starting out and have a question?
If it is not in the man pages or the how-to's this is the place!
Notices
Welcome to LinuxQuestions.org, a friendly and active Linux Community.
You are currently viewing LQ as a guest. By joining our community you will have the ability to post topics, receive our newsletter, use the advanced search, subscribe to threads and access many other special features. Registration is quick, simple and absolutely free. Join our community today!
Note that registered members see fewer ads, and ContentLink is completely disabled once you log in.
If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us. If you need to reset your password, click here.
Having a problem logging in? Please visit this page to clear all LQ-related cookies.
Get a virtual cloud desktop with the Linux distro that you want in less than five minutes with Shells! With over 10 pre-installed distros to choose from, the worry-free installation life is here! Whether you are a digital nomad or just looking for flexibility, Shells can put your Linux machine on the device that you want to use.
Exclusive for LQ members, get up to 45% off per month. Click here for more info.
The most common cause for that "Operation not permitted" is that the filesystem, perhaps one of the FAT variants, does not support the notion of ownership. Ownership of files on such a filesystem is established by a mount option and can be changed only by remounting with different uid and/or gid options.
Thanks for the replies guys.
So if the file system [Fat32] is not being recognised to allow the change in 'ownership', what file system would be compatible?
But what operating systems do you want to read the files on? Neither Windows nor OS X have native support for the above filesystems.
Also ownership on a USB drive is kinda pointless and pointlessly annoying. You format it btrfs, you copy some files to it, the permissions are such that only you can read them. You take the USB drive to another machine, log in, plug in the USB drive, you can't read the files. The UID of your usercode on this machine isn't the same as your UID on the machine you copied the files from. So that's annoying. If you have root on this second machine you can change the ownership on the files so you can read them (now you have reversed the problem), or alter the permissions so you can read them. So the ownership provides no security.
What are you attempting to achieve by setting ownership on the files on the USB drive?
But what operating systems do you want to read the files on? Neither Windows nor OS X have native support for the above filesystems.
Also ownership on a USB drive is kinda pointless and pointlessly annoying. You format it btrfs, you copy some files to it, the permissions are such that only you can read them. You take the USB drive to another machine, log in, plug in the USB drive, you can't read the files. The UID of your usercode on this machine isn't the same as your UID on the machine you copied the files from. So that's annoying. If you have root on this second machine you can change the ownership on the files so you can read them (now you have reversed the problem), or alter the permissions so you can read them. So the ownership provides no security.
What are you attempting to achieve by setting ownership on the files on the USB drive?
Thanks for replying.
It's not so much the files on the drive but the drive itself I want access. I often download files and video clips on to a small external HDD and play then on my TV through the USB socket on my Blu-ray player. The point is I have to transfer files etc to the ext-HDD using Nemo through the Terminal and sudo which transfers the files successfully but at a slower rate. I've now Formatted the ext-HDD to NTFS and it now works okay
LinuxQuestions.org is looking for people interested in writing
Editorials, Articles, Reviews, and more. If you'd like to contribute
content, let us know.