I installed a 40gig HD on my system and formatted it with FAT32. I currently have a dual boot system (Suse 10/Win2k). My idea was that the drive could be used by both Windows and Suse. I finally have it where I can write to it when I am logged is as root, but not as a regular user. I right click on the drive and go to properties. I changed the permissions for "group" and "others", but when I go back later, the permissions are back to "view content only".

In /etc/fstab, you should have a line that looks something like this:

umask=000 is the key element.

Rickh, just wondering, how come sometimes on my FAT partition mounted with same options as you have, I still don't have permission to modify a file? After chmod 777, it works fine.

I thought umask=000 kind of "negated" any permissions?

Two things:

One, "umask=000" works, but so does "umask=0". The trailing two zeros are not needed.

Two, this makes the directory contents (but not the mount point, that is done with chmod) open to all users on the system, which is what you want. Remember that fat32 does not have unix permissions built in on the file level, for that you need umsdos which is a fat-hack that adds a text file to each directory with a list of contents and their respective unix permissions.

Using umsdos allows you to install and run a linux system from a fat partition. (not advised) Such an example is ZipSlack.

I don't want to argue whether it should be umask=000 or umask=0. The later works perfectly on my Ubuntu system, but I have heard of problems with suse requires all three bits to be set.

The way umask works is simple: As it has been said before, fat32 doesn't know permissions. This means you can only set global permissions for the whole filesystem. umask "substracts" from full Unix permissions (chmod 777). So if you'd like to restrict access to members of the mounting group, you need to change the second and third bit, e.g. umask=022 to give chmod 755 permissions.

Just to help, I use this for my fat32 and it works perfectly.


This was what Suse automatically configured my fstab as when I installed Suse 10 however long ago when 10.0 came out.