I am having trouble finding the correct options to put in my fstab to fix my permissions on a fat partition. I have a partition that I use for mp3s and everything in the file is owned by root. I would like the mp3s and such on the partition to be owned by a regular user. Here is my fstab line:

/dev/hda5 /media vfat user,umask=000 0 0

I hope this makes sense, and I have found similar posts about this problem but none seemed to fix it for me. Thanks for the help everyone.

try this:



/dev/hda5 /media vfat exec,rw,umask=000 0 2

although it is good practice to put mounts under /mnt (/mnt/media i.e.)

Ok I made that change but everything is still owned by root under that partition and I can't change the ownership still. I get the operation not permitted error. Is there something else I am doing wrong? Also could you explain the reason for the choice of options you gave me, I am just curious and want to learn he he. Thanks again

That umask value (000) will allow anyone to do anything in the media directory from this point on, changing the permissions to "rwxrwxrwx" for that directory........................When trying to change ownership for the already existing files, did you use the 'chown' command as root:

I don't think you can change the ownership of the files on an FAT file system. Whoever mounts the file system owns the files. If you mount it automatically, then all the files will be owned by root. If you must have them 'owned' by a normal user, you can mount the file system manually as a normal user if you have user or users option set in fstab. But umask=000 should allow you to do everything you want with the files even if they are owned by root. (they are not really owned since fat filesystem doesn't support file ownership).

Your right...............vfat is a pain

In that case, you _can_ set the ownership through fstab using the 'uid=' and 'gid=' options. You will need to know the id numbers for the user (uid) and the group (gid). To easily find them, run this command: You'll get some output similar to this (this is mine): The first four-digit set of numbers is the 'uid', the second three-digit set of numbers is the 'gid'.........................FYI, the first field is the username, the third field is the user id (uid), the fourth field is the group id (gid), the fifth field is the user's full name, the sixth field is the user's home directory, and the last field is the default shell for the user. I'm not sure what the x in the second field is, except maybe to enable/disable the user (just a guess).

Anyway, in fstab you want to set the options for your vfat directory like so: Just be sure to use the numbers for your username. That'll set the user and group attributes to match the user....................After making any changes, you'll need to 'umount /dev/hda5' then run 'mount -a' to let the changes take effect.

But as quatsch pointed out, with the umask=000 option alone, anyone can do anything in that directory. This was just to show you how it can be done.

make sure the folder /media is set to 777 permissions (chmod 777 /media)

try adding the option "auto" (without quotes) to that fstab line; that way whenver a user logs on, the partition is mounted by that specific user

The umask=000 option is the same as the 'chmod 777' command and the 'defaults' option includes 'auto'.

From the man pages for mount: