[SOLVED] Changing ownership of USB 'Not Permitted' Why?

gael33 · 05-26-2015, 11:20 AM

gael33@gael33-Aspire-X3950 ~ $ sudo chown $USER:$USER /media/usb1
[sudo] password for gael33:
gael33@gael33-Aspire-X3950 ~ $ sudo chown $USER:$USER /media/usb1
chown: changing ownership of ‘/media/usb1’: Operation not permitted
gael33@gael33-Aspire-X3950 ~ $

Any idea why I cannot change permissions on my USB drive?
Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

gael

jailbait · 05-26-2015, 11:34 AM

Check /etc/sudoers to see if you are allowed to issue the chown command using sudo.

------------------
Steve Stites

rknichols · 05-26-2015, 01:53 PM

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.

gael33 · 05-26-2015, 03:09 PM

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?

arizonagroovejet · 05-26-2015, 03:30 PM

ext3 ext4, btrfs, xfs, others

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?

gael33 · 05-26-2015, 03:48 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by arizonagroovejet

ext3 ext4, btrfs, xfs, others

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

Thanks

gael