[NBLUG/talk] Adding a used second HDD

[Mitch Patenaude]

On Nov 17, 2004, at 11:28 AM, Robert Hayes wrote:
> I changed the mount to rw, but I still can't take ownership or change
> properties of the files.
>
> As root, I open /dev/hdd. All the files are owned by root.
>
> I attempt to change the ownership or permissions and get the following 
> result:
>
> Could not modify the ownership of file /scratch/filename.txt.
> You have insufficient access to the file to perform the change.

Oh... well that explains it.

FAT filesystems don't have any idea about ownership or permissions, 
having been designed for a non-networked, single-user computer 
system... so the linux driver for FAT (and vfat, and fat32, etc.) just 
simulates it by giving all files the same ownership and permissions.  
That's what the other options people mentioned were for.

mount -t vfat -o rw,uid=bob,gid=bob,umask=022 /dev/hdd1 /scratch

that will mount the volume with all files owned by user 'bob', (owned 
by group 'bob' too.. that's gid), and set to permissions -rwxr-xr-x 
(the umask is an inverse of the permissions.)

   -- Mitch