i have a external hard disk that is NTFS file system i can open it but only in root (fine with me ) but when i copy all my music off of it to my user account so i can get to it it still has the locks on it so i cant play them but i do NOT want to go thru EVERY FILE AND EVERY SONG just to change permissions on them and i can seem to change the permissions on the HOLE disk cause it says READ ONLY is there a way i can change all the permissions of all files and folders in the main folder or is there a way to change the disk to something other than read only i am running FC5 distro

Use a command like ' chown -R owner name_of_directory ' as root since root owns the file.
chown -R bob /storage

Do the same with chgrp
chgrp -R bob /storage

Brian1

ok i did that and it ran thru all my file saying it was changing and at the end of each file it said Read Only System File but it still wont change anything

how do i get it out of read only mode

May need to chmod files.
chmod -R 700 /storage

or for everyone.
chmod -R 700 /storage

You read up on these commands with the command ' man '
man chmod
man chown
man chgrp
man ls

Brian1

Use dots after sentences end, and use paragraphs. Overall, post more analytical and exact.

- Use chmod, or describe your problem better.

Sorry if this tip cannot match.

The file system these files are on is mounted as read only. Sounds like you're trying to do it on the NTFS drive and not local copies.

yea i am trying to get them off the NTFS drive itself

You're definitely a candidate to reading this page entirely.

i have a external hard disk that is NTFS file system i can open it, but only in root (fine with me ) but when i copy all my music off of it to my user account so i can get to it it still has the locks on it. so i cant play them, but i do NOT want to go thru EVERY FILE AND EVERY SONG just to change permissions on them, and i cant seem to change the permissions on the HOLE disk cause it says CANT CHANGE PERMISSIONS BECAUSE DISK IS READ ONLY. is there a way to change the disk to something other than read only. I WANT TO BE ABLE TO PLUG IT IN AND VIEW ANY THING ON IT WITH OUT GOING TO ROOT IF POSSABLE. i am running FC5 distro

the extermal drived is used on my laptop which is company owned and i cant put linux on iT.


i hope this explains things better.

I seem to be having the same problem and hope this might make things clear

I run Fedora Core 5 on an i686 and I have NTFS support installed.
I connected an external NTFS hard disk (someone else's) to my usb
drive.

When I am logged in as an ordinary user, Fedora can't automatically
mount it, because I don't have the permissions.

So I su - and mount it manually. At that point ls -l
gives for every file and directory that the owner is root and only
the owner has read and write permissions.

So I try chown recursively, and that changes
every directory on the disk, but not of the files.

When I try chmod recursively (as root or as user) this gives
me an "operation not permitted" for all the files.

The commands lsattr and chattr both give either a
"permission denied" or an "Inappropriate IOTCL".

So I hope this clarifies the problem a bit and I hope someone can
help with it.

Thanks in advance... Ton

You can't change permissions on an NTFS filesystem, it doesn't support Unix-like permissions. You can however use the umask option during mounting which should allow you to access the files as a user but you won't be able to write to NTFS, you can technically but it's not considered "safe" yet.

http://wiki.linux-ntfs.org/doku.php?id=howto:mount