Operation (by root) not permitted

Hiya,

Okay, I'm baffled. What in the Ubuntu 9.07 is going on here?

# uname -a
Linux BlueBeast.localhost 2.6.28-11-generic #42-Ubuntu SMP Fri Apr 17 01:57:59 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux

Logged in as root I've edited /etc/fstab.
I want the /Meta vfat partition completely open (unlocked).

# cat /etc/fstab
 # /Meta was /dev/sda5 
 UUID=45F2-140B  /Meta     vfat    utf8,users,noauto   0       1

# mount
/dev/sda5 on /Meta type vfat (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,utf8)

# cat /etc/mtab
/dev/sda5 /Meta vfat rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,utf8 0 0

# ls -al
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 1969-12-31 17:00 Meta

# chgrp -hR users /Meta
chgrp: changing group of `/Meta/Linux/TextTest.txt': Operation not permitted
chgrp: changing group of `/Meta/Linux': Operation not permitted
chgrp: changing group of `/Meta/TextTest.txt': Operation not permitted
chgrp: changing group of `/Meta/FireFoxMint.jpg': Operation not permitted
chgrp: changing group of `/Meta/FireFoxFedora.jpeg': Operation not permitted
chgrp: changing group of `/Meta/FireFoxSuSE.jpg': Operation not permitted
chgrp: changing group of `/Meta/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-190.53-pkg1.run': Operation not permitted
chgrp: changing group of `/Meta': Operation not permitted

I can not figure out what in Ubuntu (Mint 7) stops root (#) from assigning permissions here.
Can you?
This vfat partition was created in SuSE 9.3 and used mkdosfs to create the file system.
/Meta is a common mount point (folder?) for multiple of my Linux distros. But it's getting harder to use.
As root, it functions okay (mostly) as a common data folder. I want to give access to all users
of any current-booted Linux. In SuSE 10.3 the process required a new /etc/fstab entry followed
by the chgrp command as above. But in Ubuntu, I'm a bit lost.
Here I can see a disagreement between /etc/fstab and /etc/mtab that I can't reconcile.

It may be a while before I can return to the PLUG mail list. So be patient with me.

  (-:  Chas.M.  :-)                           

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