Hi all

I just installed rh9 on a friend's PC as a single drive dual-boot. He began with two 15GB NTFS partitions, so I removed the second one, gave about 4.5GB to / and then filled up the remaining space with a new fat32 partition (because ntfs isn't supported under linux, right?, and I wanted him to be able to share his data between the two OSs). I created the fat32 partition with something called Paragon Partition Manager under XP.

I've modified fstab so that the fat32 partition is mounted to /fat32 at start-up. It's working OK except that the permissions for /fat32 (when mounted) allow only u (i.e. root) to write files. I can neither change the owner of /fat32 when mounted, or alter the permissions (and if I log in as root and make the changes in graphical mode, they simply don't get registered). This renders the partition pretty useless unless he's prepared to log in as root or do everything from the terminal. How can I make the partition writable for other users?? I never had this problem before, so I just can't work out what's going on. Furthermore, because my own computer is a few hundred miles away, I can't check it out for comparison.

Best, Ian

What does the fstab entry for the part. look like? My guess is that you would have to make the files owned by the user or group of users that you want to be able to write to the partition with the gid and.or uid options.

Ian

did you try chmod? or like green_dragon37 said, chown?

chmod 775 /thepartition <-- this makes the root and user have read/write/executable rights with other having only read/executable.

chown useryouwanttoownpartition /thepartition

Hi, and cheers for the replies

fstab looks like:

LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hda5 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hda6 /fat32 vfat defaults 1 1
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0

chmod doesn't work once the partition is mounted. Here's the error I get:

[root@e-stc004 root]# chmod a+w /fat32
chmod: changing permissions of `/fat32' (requested: 0777, actual: 0755): Operation not permitted

I get the same effect if I umount and then mount manually with:

[root@e-stc004 root]# mount -t vfat /dev/hda6 /fat32

Cheers

Ian

in /etc/fstab under options, for the mounted drive set umask=002

Change this line:
/dev/hda6 /fat32 vfat defaults 1 1
to
/dev/hda6 /fat32 vfat users,auto,umask=002,rw 0 0
Or for the more technical geeks:
/dev/hda6 /fat32 vfat users,uid=0,gid=0,umask=002,auto,noexec,rw 0 0



Cool

cheers for all the help

In the end I used uid=500,gid=500 because using 0 (i.e. root) left me with exactly the same problems.

All best, Ian

And I should be slapped with a mighty wet noodle, that should have been my numbers in my example, not root's uid

Cool

No problem. At least it made me think about what the values meant!!

Many thanks

Ian