I am running redhat 9 and for some reason even as root I am unable to change the permissions for a fat32 drive I share with WinXP (dual booting). This is a desktop machine I use at home to try out Linux and for internet access. I want to give rwx to all users (me!) for that drive, but system says "operation not permitted". Is there something I can do? This problem arose following an up2date change a little while ago. The drive is mounted.

You cannot change the permissions for a directory mounted via /etc/fstab as anyone other than root, if you have used the default settings/mount point for the drive, and defintely not while the drive is mounted under any circumstances.

Unmount the drive, open a terminal and su to root, then surf to the folder (or open a file manager from the root terminal), and change the permissions of the folder the drive is mounted into. Then remount the drive.

You might also want to edit /etc/fstab (assuming that the drive is listed in /etc/fstab) to change the mount point to someplace that you as a user naturally have permissions (meaning your $HOME$ directory), and add options to allow users to mount and umount the drives, execute files, and modify the permissions of other users neither you nor root.

Read man fstab and man mount for more details, or you can also read the middle section ("Sharing partittions between OSes") of a tutorial I wrote that offers what I hope is a more "human-readable" explanation of the issues involved.

Hope this helps.

I really appreciate that advice. I hadn't realised (newbie, ....still, I guess!) that you cannot change permissions of a mounted drive, and had never thought of mounting it somewhere sensible like my home directory! Now have access through my username rather than as root.

Great!

Glad to have been of help .