chmod, and disks generally

jburford · 11-19-2002, 04:51 AM

I run a system using removable disks to run RH7.3 and W98 alternately. A single fixed disc was intended as a commen data area. I formattted this as a W98/VFAT disc, but while I can mount this in RH7.3, I cannot change permissions. Could anyone give me a brief guide to where I should look, or where I can find further information, or what I am doing wrong?

Jim

MasterC · 11-19-2002, 05:10 AM

It might be in how you are mounting it... I sort of understand your "setup" and am not sure if what I am about to say will help, but it's worth a shot:

You need to set a umask to allow the permissions you want, I do this in my fstab for the given partition I want the permissions set on, so for example:
/dev/hdb6 /mnt/fat32 vfat users,auto,rw,umask=000 1 0

Is one of my entries. You'd replace the /dev and /mnt point as needed, but it gives you an idea of where to start.

HTH

Cool

jburford · 11-20-2002, 04:03 AM

Bugger! - it works but I can't find out why!

Could you point me to some doco? I appreciate it working, but I do not understand why, and I view a lot of these problems as a learning experience......

And the couple of books I have, the man page, etc don't help.

thanks for your help, but what is umask? was it the VFAT format? was it that the disk was originally formatted by W98? Please give me an idea on where to look!

sorry to ask again, butI want to learne the why?, as well as how?

Jim