Mounting FAT partitions on Ubuntu

[Joseph Sinclair]

Please read all of this, what you're trying to do cannot be accomplished the way you're trying to do it.

You should never be able to login as root.  Ubuntu does it the "proper" way by using sudo.
To get a root login, simply "sudo su -" and, after entering *your* password, you'll be in as root.
Most of the time, you should just be root for a single command, in which case "sudo <command>" works just fine.
Of course, this won't help you change the permissions of the mounted volumes, but that's handled below.

You cannot change the permissions on a mounted FAT/VFAT/NTFS partition.
You cannot change the owner on a mounted FAT/VFAT/NTFS partition either.
This is because FAT/VFAT don't have permissions in the filesystem, and NTFS uses ACL's and MAC, which Linux doesn't support very well at this point.

If youwant to have access to a FAT/VFAT or NTFS partition mounted in Linux, you must modify the mount commands to specify the umask, and/or the uid options.
If you specify a 000 umask, you should see drwxrwxrwx for the file permissions on the mounted volume.
For VFAT, dmask and fmask provide a good split, since a umask of 000 leaves EVERY file executable, but umask 111 leaves directories unreadable, see the example below for the solution
If you want to change the owner of the files, set the uid=#### option to the uid of your user.
Be sure to prepend sudo to the mount command.

e.g. sudo mount -t vfat -o dmask=000,fmask=111,rw,nouser,sync,uid=1000 /dev/hda2 /mnt/drivec

Good luck.

BTW, the reason you don't get an error trying to change the permissions and/or owner on the partitions is because the default for mounting a FAT/VFAT/NTFS partition is "quiet" which means any premissions setting actions are silently ignored.

==Joseph++

Bryan.ONeal at asu.edu wrote:
> Ok, perhaps its late, perhaps I am tired, perhaps I an newb in disguise...  But
> I can not get this Ubuntu install do mount my two fat partitions in an rw mode
> 
> 1)I can chmod the two folders to +w on group and wold, but it dosn't take.  when
> I ls -l they are back to drwxr-xr-x even though chmod says it changed it.  
> 2)If I umount and mount again specifying write, it goes through, but still will
> not let me write.
> 3)Even if I could get it to go I can not find an fstab anywhere! So how do I
> change the mount behavior for these volumes?
> 4)I had this problem with FC4 but I fixed it by login in as root and changing
> the owner of the  mount folders to my primary user, but I can not loginto Ubuntu
> as root.
> 
> This is one of many things I must figure out before I give the box to my dad...
>  Installing VMWare is the only other thing I can not find a helpful guide on...
> 
> Thnks in advance, 
>    Mr. Fealing like a newb
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