File ownership in /mnt

[Bambi]

Something strange is happening when I try to copy files from my home directory to /mnt/hdc2 (one of my other drives). I use the -p option to preserve file atributes but i get an error saying operation not premitted. It does the copy but the owner and group of the file are changed to root rwxrwxrwx. Eventualy i want to copy my whole home directory across and then mount the drive as my home directory but i dont want all my files to be ownd by root. What am i doing wrong?

I did a test by making a directory in / and gave it full wr permissions. Copying stuff to it as a normal user worked fine with all file atributes preserved. Has it something to do with the fact that /mnt/hdc2 is another drive?

[Malakin]

This could be caused by the filesystem on the target partition.

[Bambi]

The target file system is fat32. Could this be the problem?

[Malakin]

fat32 doesn't support those filesystem features.

[MrMoray]

I just worked through a similar issue and figured out the fat32 problem myself. Unfortunately, the only solution I could find was to reformat the drive. It solved the problem, but obviously everything on the drive had to be backed up first...otherwise its gone.

[Bambi]

I have only ever formatted a drive when installing. What program must i use? Is there something like fdisk for linux?

[Evil Jeff]

Yes, as a matter of fact. It's called fdisk.
:)