Hello all,

running Debian Etch; kernel 2.6

So I create /usb and set the permissions with chmod ugo=rwx.
I do a ls –l to verify that the permission are set and everything looks okay.
I mount the device on /usb using
$mount /dev/sdc1 /usb
Output from mount after it’s mounted is as follows:
/dev/sdc1 on /usb type vfat (rw)
As soon as I mount the drive in the directory my permissions are stripped and set back to
drwxr-xr-x 19 root root 32768 1969-12-31 19:00 usb

Ultimately I’m trying to get access to the drive via win xp & samba
I can see the drive but I can’t write to it. I’m assuming it’s this permission problem.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

Did you read 'man mount' about fmask and dmask?

The FAT file system does not support Linux permissions and ownership. They have to be simulated with mount options.

The basic option is 'umask=000', where the number is the inverse of the permissions you actually want (ex. if you want 644 permissions, use 'umask=133'). For finer control you can substitute dmask to set directory permissions, and fmask to set file permissions.

Two other useful options for fat mounting are 'uid=username' and 'gid=groupname' to set the owner and group the files belong to.