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zylinder4
04-02-2001, 09:26 AM
I can't seem to change the permissions for
my windows partitions or anything on the drive! I have
tried to allow rwx for all on the drive, but
nothing seems to happen. A verbose running
of chown says the permissions are 777, but
listing the directories shows the same 755.

Any advice?

eXtremist
04-02-2001, 09:49 AM
Hey zylinder4..

This was one huge problem I had when I started with linux. There are many solutions.

The easiest way I found to fix it (without changing permissions and all that crap) was to edit my /etc/fstab file.

Here is an example of what you might want in there...

/dev/hda5 /mnt/burn vfat defaults,umask=0 0 0

Okay.. Now this is only one line from that file.. Here's how it works..

The /dev/hda5 must be your windows partition. Here, it is not mine, but rather a FAT partition I am sharing between linux and windows. Yours will probably be /dev/hda1.

The /mnt/burn is the mount point of your partition. You can set it to whatever you like, but make sure it exists. Also, as a superuser, chmod 777 it. (ie. chmod 777 /mnt/burn)

The vfat part specifies the file system type. Yours should be vfat also.

If you have something different where defaults,umask=0 is, take it out and replace it with this. There may be a bunch of junk ther seperated by commas, but all you really need is those two things (defaults,umask=0). The umask part is really important. If you leave it out you will not have permission to write to the drive.

The final 0 0 does a bunch of technical crap that you don't need to know about. Just make sure they're there also.

After you change your /etc/fstab, simply "umount /dev/hda5" and "mount /dev/hda5". Of course, change the hda5 part to whatever your partition is. After this you will have a FAT partition that is readable, writable, and executable by all users.

*phew*

This should be a NHF.