Hi,

I have mounted fat16 on linux, using the following fstab.


/dev/hda7 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hda6 / reiserfs defaults 1 1
/dev/hda1 /windows vfat uid=411,gid=411,umask=007 1 0
/dev/hda5 /webdrive vfat uid=411,gid=411,umask=007 1 0
/dev/hdb1 /backup vfat uid=411,gid=411,umask=007 1 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom auto noauto,owner,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/sda2 /mnt/ipod vfat defaults,uid=500,gid=500,user,noauto 0 0


Once mounted /backup, /webdrive, /windows (including subdir and files) all have drwxrwx--- permission, and this is what I wanted.

But the problem arises when I try to change permission of any of the files\dires. It will always stick to -rwxrwx--- and nor can I change its ownership.

Any suggestions?


Regards~

FAT doesn't allow for perm changes like that thru linux to the best of my understanding. It's not a very linux friendly filesystem. You'll have to live with it I'm afraid.

fat16 doesnt have the capability to set permissions, you would need to set those permissions in fstab under the options

Oh man :\
Wish I knew it before.
So NTFS will do the trick here?

Besides that, are there tools available (for linux) to convert Fat to NTFS ? Or wots the fastest way to convert anyway ?


Thankyou ~

i don't know what the recent devlopments on NTFS is, but last time i checked, you couldn't.

yup, the permission you gave to the whole partition (0770) is due to the umask (007) you specified in the fstab file. Looks ok and properly done as you gave a user and a group to own the files and directories, pretty much like as I have set up mine FAT32 partitions. You could substitute the umask with 2 parameters that work pretty much alike, dmask and fmask: the former for directories and the latter for files in that partition.

As mentioned before, no FAT filesystem has support for UNIX-like permissions, nor does microsoft's NTFS.

You better stay with FAT partitions if you want to share files in a dual boot set up with windoze, as NTFS is not properly supported by linux (just read-only) though there are several proyects out there trying to provide write support on NTFS, those are only betas and I would not rely on that.

Yeah, the idea of dmask and fmask sounds nice. So I edited my fstab to make it look like this:

/dev/hdb1 /backup vfat uid=411,gid=411,dmask=007,fmask=000 1 0
/dev/hda5 /webdrive vfat uid=411,gid=411,dmask=007,fmask=000 1 0
/dev/hda1 /windows vfat uid=411,gid=411,dmask=007,fmask=000 1 0


But I am not getting the desired output result. This is what I get:

for ls -l

drwxr-xr-x 7 web web 16384 1970-01-01 00:00 backup/
drwxr-xr-x 8 web web 32768 1970-01-01 00:00 webdrive/
drwxr-xr-x 9 web web 8192 1970-01-01 00:00 windows/


for ls -l /windows

-rwxr-xr-x 1 web web 8192 2006-04-17 18:33 found.009*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 web web 230424 2006-01-10 15:14 img2-001.raw*
-r-xr-xr-x 1 web web 222390 1999-04-23 22:22 io.sys*
dr-xr-xr-x 40 web web 8192 2005-12-26 13:08 Program\ Files/

Same results for /webdrive and /backup. Now I am stuck with -r-xr-xr-x. Even if I change dmask, i get the same result.

Any suggestions ?


Thankyou