Re: [gentoo-user] Cannot edit files on usb flash drive.

[John H. Moe]

On 08/03/10 16:46, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On Monday 08 March 2010 08:31:40 ubiquitous1980 wrote:
>> I have a usb flash drive which will not allow me to edit its files.  I
>> have tried chmod a+rwx -R $files but this does still not permit
>> editing.  Further, the files within the directories refuse to have
>> ownership changed via chown $myusername -R /mnt/disk.  Output is:
>> operation not permitted.  Any ideas?  Thanks.
>
> This happens when the flash drive is type vfat. This excuse for a file system
> does not have a concept of owners and permissions so the kernel has to fudge
> it. You are finding that you cannot change these for the simple reason that
> they do not exist and the kernel is pretending they are owned by root with
> MODE 755 or some such.
>
> If hal is mounting the device, check your hal config, looking for some likely
> named option.
>
> If the device is mounted via /etc/fstab, adjust the uid/gid/umask/dmask/fmask
> options to mount in column 4. Full details in the man page, under section
> "fat"
>

I use both a USB memory stick with VFAT, and a USB hard drive with
NTFS.  Both work fine, but I *am* mounting both as my user account using
/etc/fstab.  Entries are as follows:

LABEL="USBSTICK"        /media/usbstick         auto    user,noauto     0 0
LABEL="USBstorage"      /media/usbstorage       ntfs-3g user,noauto     0 0

Then I just type "mount /media/usbstick" and use it as normal.

John Moe