I need to copy my data from the pc to an external hard drive with keeping the attributes;
so i used the command

cp -rp ~/sourceDir ~/Destination

but when i am coping it it give the error message
"cp: failde to preserve ownership for 'file' : Operation not permitted

and it copied the files to the destination but the attributes has changed from
-rw-r--r-- to
-rwxr-xr-x

I tried to copy it by loging as the root also but still the same thing happens. If possible please let me know how to copy the files with preserving the attributes

Thanks

What is the file system type on the external drive?

/dev/sdb1 vfat

vfat doesn't support many features you would normally expect to be in place on a linux drive. Like full support of ownership and permissions/modes... see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAT_filesystem_and_Linux for more detail.

Make the drive ext3/4, etc and you won't have as many issues. Long and short, vfat is crap for *nix operating systems.

how can i change the file system of my external hard to ext3/4?

Backup the files somewhere and run mkfs.ext[3/4] on drive to format

Just bear in mind that *if* you do that you won't be able to trivially
access the drive from any other OS but Linux; MacOS and Windows
won't be natively able to access it.

True... but even formating it from windows as ntfs would be a better option provided you've got support for it in linux turned on.