[Bio-Linux] chown problems?

[Nicolas Bertrand]

Hi Jose,

It could be that the USB hard drive is formatted as a Fat32 filesystem (vfat to a linux machine). Such filesystem does not support permissions. 

you could
1. mount the drive so all users have read and write permissions :
edit /etc/fstab as follows:
/dev/sdd1       /media/usbdrive vfat    rw,umask=000     0      0

-- not good if you require some access control on the raw data.

2. backup your data and reformat the drive with a file system that support permissions (e.g. ext2)

utility to use to reformat filesystem is mkfs

e.g. mkfs -t ext2 /dev/sdd1

man mkfs for more info.

-- please note that a windows or macosx machine won't be able to access the data on that partition out of the box --

Hope this helps,

Nic
-- CEH Environmental Informatics Programme



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>>> jaa53 at cornell.edu 09/05/2006 23:18 >>>
Hi All!

I've decided to mount an external hard drive on our bio-linux machine so
everyone can store there their raw data (mostly traces)

I already done that (/media/usbdrive)  the /etc/fstab line looks like

/dev/sdd1       /media/usbdrive auto    rw,user,auto     0      0

There only one partition of the drive and on it I made a data-storage
directory with 5 different subdirectories for the users...

(ls -l on /media/usbdrive/data-storage/
total 160
drwxr-xr-x  3 manager manager 32768 2006-05-09 16:19 user1
drwxr-xr-x  2 manager manager 32768 2006-05-09 16:18 user2
drwxr-xr-x  2 manager manager 32768 2006-05-09 16:18 user3
drwxr-xr-x  2 manager manager 32768 2006-05-09 16:18 user4
drwxr-xr-x  2 manager manager 32768 2006-05-09 16:18 user5

As you see manager is both the owner and the group. I 've tried to change
this  (log as manager) using Konkeror and sudo chown
e.g. sudo chown user1 /media/usbdrive/data-storage/user1

but I got the following error
chown: changing ownership of `/media/usbdrive/data-storage/user1':
Operation not permitted

That's also true even if I log on as root!!

Any ideas on how to change the onwership of the files?

Thanks!

/Jose


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