Re: Changing ownership & permissions of Free Agent USB drive

Raj Kiran Grandhi wrote:
andy wrote:
Hello

I am attempting to change the ownership of and permissions for the contents of a USB Seagate Free Agent drive. At present, root has ownership, although everybody and their dog can rwx files:
$ ls -l /media/FreeAgent\ Drive/
total 24
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 2007-11-27 20:28 BAKUPS
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 2007-11-19 20:39 DVD
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 24576 2008-02-16 15:50 MUZAK
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 2007-11-04 00:04 System Volume Information

As root (actually, both attempted as root via su as well as via sudo), I have attempted:
chown andy /media/FreeAgent\ Drive/ -R

as well as
chmod -R og-rwx /media/FreeAgent\ Drive/

and
chmod -R u+rw /media/FreeAgent\ Drive/

Unfortunately, the output of ls -l /media/FreeAgent\ Drive/ remains
total 24
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 2007-11-27 20:28 BAKUPS
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 2007-11-19 20:39 DVD
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 24576 2008-02-16 15:50 MUZAK
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 2007-11-04 00:04 System Volume Information

This doesn't interfere with my playing the music listed under MUZAK as andy, nor adding to the files. But, it does not change the description of the permissions related to those files.

Can someone explain what's going on here please?

What is the filesystem on your usb drive? It appears to be fat32/ntfs. fat32 does not know anything about file owners/group permissions. You have to specify everything you want when you mount it. Try passing the uid=<your uid> option when mounting the drive. For the permissions you can pass the umask option. Refer to the mount manpage for more details.
Thanks Raj for the steer - that it is a fat32/ntfs and hence doesn't recognise permissions, etc., would make sense.

Cheers

Andy

--

"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." - Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"


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