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Linux and USB flash drive... yes, it mounts...

A

AtlantaBob

Golden Member
Hello all,

I'm trying to use a flash drive (actually a couple) between three computers -- one runs Ubuntu 7.4, another runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, and another is running Windows XP.

I use the flash drive to move files between computers. Every now and again, the flash drive is seen as "read only" on the Red Hat computer, apparently because the owner/file permissions have changed after I've used it on the Windows/Ubuntu machine.

Is there a way to avoid this problem, and stop having to use chown and chmod every time I plug the darn thing in? Sometimes, even that doesn't work.

The flash drives are all formatted FAT32.

Thanks for your help!
 
Well Fat32 isn't posix-compatable. It doesn't store anything about Unix permissions.

So the chown'ng and chmod'ng and such realy isn't accomplishing much. How it works is that the 'owner' of the files in the file system is the person who mounted it or a option specifying a specific group or user to own it through a mount option.

I suspect the problem comes from how your mounting the thing. If your using sudo vs root acount vs letting gnome-vfs mount the device automaticly. Then there may be permission issues with the actual directory being used to mount the drive.

Maybe that rings a bell?
 
Drag,

Thanks, that does make a lot of sense, as I didn't understand how/where such data would be stored anyway on a FAT 32 partition. Obviously, I should read up more.

I've been letting gnome mount the drive automatically in every case. Are you saying that somehow the permissions are getting confused on the \mnt\usbdrive directory, or?

Sorry, it's been a long day, and I haven't had enough coffee.
 
Slashes go the other way in sane OSes and whenever a filesystem is mounted it's permissions (or the ones made up by the VFS for filesystems like FAT) replace those on the mounted directory. The next time the permissions seem weird run 'ls -ld /mnt/usbdrive' and 'mount' and see what they say.
 
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