Media Drive Permissions

[Nils Kassube]

Mark Traceur wrote:
> I have four drives inside of my computer. Two are for operating
> systems (80GB for Kubuntu, 160GB for Vista because it's a resource
> hog) and two for media files (videos, pictures, music, documents,
> backups, etc.)
> 
> One of the media drives (I call him Media, it's a very creatively
> named bunch of drives) is mounted perfectly and has everything
>  figured out in life. He is an ntfs drive.
> 
> The other (her name is Media2, she's a bit bigger but Media loves her
> very much) is a fat32 partition, and it is also mounted well.

And always remember that for fat32 the file size limit is 4GiB-1 ... but 
that has nothing to do with your permissions problem.

>  However, I do not have permission to write there. Anytime I want to
>  write to the disk, I have to do it as root.

How do you mount your media partitions? Is it via /etc/fstab, or do you 
mount the partitions manually? If it is with /etc/fstab, you should add 
the uid and / or gid mount options. Then the relevant fstab line would 
look like this:

UUID=9CC4-F7CA /media/Media2 vfat uid=1000,gid=46 0 0

where the UUID is from one of my USB sticks and gid=46 is the group 
plugdev on my machine (IIRC this isn't the same number on every system). 
If you manually mount the partitions, use the -ouid=1000,gid=46 mount 
option for the mount command.

> I've tried sudo chown -R mark /media/Media2, but it says something
> like "chown: changing ownership of `/media/Media2/Movies/Tron':
> Operation not permitted" for every file, and I wind up back at square
> one.

That is expected bahaviour because fat32 doesn't know owner / group 
permissions, those are set in stone when the partition is mounted.


Nils