permissions of a partition on USB stick not changing as root even

[MR ZenWiz]

On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 11:26 PM, Tapas Mishra <mightydreams at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 12:50 PM, Nils Kassube <kassube at gmx.net> wrote:
>> Tapas Mishra wrote:
>>> I am having a USB disk.
>>> I want to change the permissions of  folder on it from 700 to 755
>>> (and all subdirectories in it)
>>
>> The FAT32 file system doesn't know Linux (Unix) permissions. You could
>> only change the permissions with the mount option "umask=022" (I think
>> this would be the right one, but I didn't try it myself) when mounting
>> the partition. Or maybe you want the dmask mount option?
> Ok interesting information.
>>See "man 8
>> mount" for details. Anyway, it is a setting available only for the
>> entire partition,
> Yes I want for entire partition.
>> not individual directory trees and on the next machine
>> the permissions are gone. If you really need Linux permissions, use a
>> Linux file system like ext2.
> That is exactly the problem this can not happen so I asked here a
> solution.Some thing that I can do.
>

I've never seen anything that would let you do what you want.  The FAT
file systems are incompatible with UNIX-style file permissions.  The
only allowances for this have to do with how the USB drive is mounted.
 If it happens automatically, the way it's supposed to, the owner
shows up as me and the group shows as my group.  If I have to mount it
"manually" via mount (as root), it shows up as owned by root:root.
Either way, the permissions are 700 for the directories, 644 for files
(unless you remount it with exec permission added, in which case the
file permissions are 755).

The only work around I know of for this is as Nils suggested - use a
Linux format file system on the drive.  If you can't use that, then
you're kind of stuck.