XP - My Documents Folder
 

I put this folder on a FAT32 drive so I could access it from Windows and Linux. I can read files from that directory and the rest of the partition. Interestingly I cannot write to that directory (even as root) but can write to other directories in that partition.

What would cause that?

Check your /etc/fstab and make sure that you have umask=000 which should give you rwx access. Also, make sure the drive was mounted with rw instead of ro.

So you are saying that there are umask options that will give you partial write access on a partition? How would Linux know to exclude this particular directory on the partition and not any others?

Are you sure that what you transfered to the FAT32 partition is the actual folder or maybe a Windows system link?

The 'real' path to this folder on my system is C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\My Documents. Maybe Linux isn't able to follow the link properly, or the actual data is located on NTFS. It could also be that Linux has trouble with the character encoding of the path (iso8859-1 vs. utf8).

Yo will see that in XP you can change the Target Location that My Document points to. The actual folder (called My Stuff) was created on the FAT32 drive (E: in XP). Then I changed XP from pointing to the folder similar to the one you cite to E:\My Stuff (D: being the XP NTFS system drive).

And I see the folder (My Stuff) not as a link in Konqueror but as an actual directory.

I have no idea what that means :(

I am not completely sure about this, but AFAIK Windows uses iso8859-1 to encode its characters, while SUSE used utf8. You may have noticed a webpage displaying strange characters. This is usually due to a wrong character encoding (the code that produces a space may be different in iso8859-1 than in utf8). So it you type "My Documents" on a SUSE utf8 system, it may look different than the actual encoding on the windows drive. If you mount the FAT32 partition with iocharset=iso8859-1, you can force SUSE to use this encoding. But I am not a specialist here and it doesn't work properly on my system (garbled characters).

Try this: copy a file from Linux to FAT32 using the command line and preceding every space with a backslash, e.g.

cp file /windows/E/My\ Stuff/

or this way: cp file /windows/E/"My Stuff"/

It may also be helpful if you post the respective line from your /etc/fstab.

Its possible it is character encoding, but I use Suse 10 and I have a fat32 partition and it uses utf8 no problem.

I would go with what you suggested abisko..

Jongi can you please post the contents of the file "/etc/fstab" ?

You can do this by going to a command prompt and typing "cat /etc/fstab". Also can you post the output of the command "mount". The mount command displays the drives that are available to access on your Suse system.

Thanks!

Well your fstab looks correct. I'm not sure why you're mounting to "/mnt/Dual". Suse 10 defaults to "/windows/.. <drive letter>". This is what I have in my fstab:

If you do a "ls -l" on your /mnt/Dual directory, what permissions show up?

Mine show up as:
Yours should be very similar.

I just noticed that in XP, when I clicked the Folder properties, the Read-Only was selected. It was a square and not a tick. I was able to move and create files there in XP. I suspect that the square means that only the Windows user can write to that file. I will load SUSE and check if I can write to it now that I have left the read only box empty.

crazibri: I got used to mounting at /mnt some time back and I always have it the same no matter which distro I install.

If i understand correctly u took My documents from an ntfs partition to a fat32 partition so that u can modify this folder.If this is the case then this folder has still read-only attributes(since it was on an ntfs file system).Just uncheck read-only.

delta_9: Windows automatically assigns the My Documents folder to the Windows System drive. I created a Folder on a FAT32 partition, called My Stuff. I then re-pointed the My Documents folder to the My Stuff folder. After noticing I could not write to this folder from SUSE, I then went into XP. I noticed that the folder had a square in the Read Only attribute. I made that field clear (ie no tick or square). I then went into SUSE to see if I could write to this folder. No go.

I can still write to all other folders on this partition. What I will do is point the My Documents to a folder on the system drive and see whether this then allows me to write to the My Stuff folder on the FAT32 partition.

It seems that XP is very jealous of the folder designated as the My Documents folder.