<html><head></head><body>Maybe access them with elevated privileges as root. <div class="gmail_quote">On May 13, 2016 6:20:17 AM EDT, JMZ <florentior@gmail.com> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> <pre class="k9mail">Hi, I'm having some weird issues with thumb drive ownership. Steps: 1) 'sudo blkid' to call up the thumb drive assignment 2) 'sudo mount /dev/sd* /thumb' [where /dev/sd* is the drive assignment, and /thumb a directory off of the root] ---> 2a) [NB: /thumb is owned by the local account (here, 'blah') __before__ the mount command. Afterwards, the mounted thumb drive is owned by 'root' and can't be changed] 3) 'sudo touch /thumb' [for some reason, I get the default DEC 31 1969 when I mount the thumb drive] but, when I type 'sudo chown -R blah:blah /thumb', [where 'blah' is the local account], I get 'chown: changing ownership of '/thumb': Operation not permitted' *** The chown switches -R or --recursive do not work. [there are subdirectories on the thumb drive, and I would like all subdirectories to be changed to 'blah' ownership] I suspect that the system's assignment of a wrong date/time to the drive might block the ownership change even after 'touch'. Is 'touch' counterproductive? I have disabled automounting of thumb drives or indeed anything not in fstab [ie. hard drive]. I have removed the /media directory. Any ideas? Thanks, Jordan </pre></blockquote></div> -- Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.</body></html>