chgrp not permitted?

[Robert Holtzman]

On Thu, 11 Sep 2008, Craig White wrote:

> On Thu, 2008-09-11 at 17:03 -0700, Robert Holtzman wrote:
>> Running "sudo chgrp <name> mail" on a directory on a usb stick gives
>>
>> "chgrp: changing group of `mail': Operation not permitted"
>>
>> This is true for any file or directory on the stick, and yes, I entered
>> the password. I can't figure out how to copy to the stick without the
>> group being changed to root or how to change it after the fact.
>> cp -p test1 /media/disk doesn't do it and
>>
>> cp -preserve=mode,ownership,group,timestamp test1 /media/disk gives
>>
>> "cp: invalid option -- e"
>>
>> I have to be doing something wrong but I'm not sure what. Google and
>> Ubuntu forums were no help but I may be searching on the wrong terms.
>>
>> Any help appreciated. Thanks.
> ----
> a lot of details are missing but presuming that this USB disk is vfat
> filesystem, then there would nothing like POSIX users/groups and all
> files/folders are owned by the user mounting the filesystem and cannot
> be changed because a vfat system wouldn't support it.

Sorry about being so sketchy. Drive is 2 Gb with one big ext3 partition.

> If what you are trying to do is to copy files from one system to another
> and preserve those things (owner/group/timestamps), tar the file, copy
> the tar file onto the USB 'stick', copy the tar file onto your next
> Linux host and untar it there and the those attributes should be
> preserved.

That's probably optimum and I'll do it in the future (it may be the 
*only* way). Short of wiping everything I've copied to the drive already, is
there any way of reovering from here?

Thanks for the reply.

-- 
Bob Holtzman
"Next to hydrogen the most abundant thing
  in the universe is stupidity"
                           Albert Einstein