LeRoy Cressy on 25 Mar 2004 18:23:02 -0000


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Re: [PLUG] Cannot change perms on fat32 partition? 

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Gregson Helledy wrote: 
My machine (Libranet 2.0, updated with Debian Woody) has my fat32
partition mounted as /windows
In fstab, it is mounted at boot, and everything works as it should.
However, only root has write access.
Perms are (from memory):
drwxr-xr-x

/windows is owned by user root, and belongs to group root.

I would like users to be able to write to this directory, so as
root, in KDE, I right-clicked, chose properties, and set the appropriate
checkboxes.  No error is returned, but when I do a refresh in the
file manager, perms haven't changed.

So, I tried, from /:

chmod a+w windows

Again, no error was returned, but the perms haven't changed.
Just for kicks, I tried:

Look at the line in your /etc/fstab for mounting the partition. The default for fat partitions is to mount them as ro with root ownership.

# DOS file system
/dev/hda2       /dosc         auto     defaults,ro,noauto       0    0

The man page for mount shows the options for FAT file systems as follows:

Mount options for fat
(Note: fat is not a separate filesystem, but a common part of the
msdos, umsdos and vfat filesystems.)

       blocksize=512 / blocksize=1024 / blocksize=2048
              Set blocksize (default 512).

uid=value and gid=value
Set the owner and group of all files. (Default: the uid and gid
of the current process.)

umask=value
Set the umask (the bitmask of the permissions that are not
present). The default is the umask of the current process. The
value is given in octal.

dmask=value
Set the umask applied to directories only. The default is the
umask of the current process. The value is given in octal.
Present since 2.5.43.

fmask=value
Set the umask applied to regular files only. The default is the
umask of the current process. The value is given in octal.
Present since 2.5.43.

       check=value
              Three different levels of pickyness can be chosen:

r[elaxed]
Upper and lower case are accepted and equivalent, long
name parts are truncated (e.g. verylongname.foobar
becomes verylong.foo), leading and embedded spaces are
accepted in each name part (name and extension).

n[ormal]
Like "relaxed", but many special characters (*, ?, <,
spaces, etc.) are rejected. This is the default.

s[trict]
Like "normal", but names may not contain long parts and
special characters that are sometimes used on Linux, but
are not accepted by MS-DOS are rejected. (+, =, spaces,
etc.)

codepage=value
Sets the codepage for converting to shortname characters on FAT
and VFAT filesystems. By default, codepage 437 is used.

conv=b[inary] / conv=t[ext] / conv=a[uto]
The fat file system can perform CRLF<-->NL (MS-DOS text format
to UNIX text format) conversion in the kernel. The following
conversion modes are available:

              binary no translation is performed.  This is the default.

              text   CRLF<-->NL translation is performed on all files.

auto CRLF<-->NL translation is performed on all files that
don't have a "well-known binary" extension. The list of
known extensions can be found at the beginning of
fs/fat/misc.c (as of 2.0, the list is: exe, com, bin,
app, sys, drv, ovl, ovr, obj, lib, dll, pif, arc, zip,
lha, lzh, zoo, tar, z, arj, tz, taz, tzp, tpz, gz, tgz,
deb, gif, bmp, tif, gl, jpg, pcx, tfm, vf, gf, pk, pxl,
dvi).

Programs that do computed lseeks won't like in-kernel text con-
version. Several people have had their data ruined by this
translation. Beware!

For file systems mounted in binary mode, a conversion tool
(fromdos/todos) is available.

cvf_format=module
Forces the driver to use the CVF (Compressed Volume File) module
cvf_module instead of auto-detection. If the kernel supports
kmod, the cvf_format=xxx option also controls on-demand CVF mod-
ule loading.

       cvf_option=option
              Option passed to the CVF module.

debug Turn on the debug flag. A version string and a list of file
system parameters will be printed (these data are also printed
if the parameters appear to be inconsistent).

fat=12 / fat=16 / fat=32
Specify a 12, 16 or 32 bit fat. This overrides the automatic
FAT type detection routine. Use with caution!

iocharset=value
Character set to use for converting between 8 bit characters and
16 bit Unicode characters. The default is iso8859-1. Long file-
names are stored on disk in Unicode format.

quiet Turn on the quiet flag. Attempts to chown or chmod files do not
return errors, although they fail. Use with caution!

sys_immutable, showexec, dots, nodots, dotsOK=[yes|no]
Various misguided attempts to force Unix or DOS conventions onto
a FAT file system.

The options that you want to mount the FAT file system should be added to your /etc/fstab as a comma separated list. 

chmod a+w /windows
chmod g+w windows

No dice.  Is something broken or am I doing something wrong?

Greg



- -- Rev. LeRoy D. Cressy mailto:leroy@lrcressy.com /\_/\
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Phone: 215-535-4037 > ^ <
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