Search code examples
debianoperationchown

Impossible to use chown even if I am logged as a root

I am currently using debian 6 squeeze. I would like to change the owner of a floder in my usb key. So I did : chown -R www-data /media/USB/myfolder/myfile

I got this message :

chown: changing ownership of `/media/USB/myfolder/myfile': Operation not permitted

I googled it, indeed my partition is a vfat and then I did : vim /etc/fstab

Then I add at the end of the file (44 is the uid of www-data): default,utf8,umask=077,uid=44,gid=44

I rebooted and I got the same error as in the beggining

chown: changing ownership of /media/USB/myfolder/myfile': Operation not permitted

Then I replaced the line in /etc/fstab by default,utf8,umask=077,uid=0,gid=0

I got the same problem after rebooting

Can anyone help me, Thank you

Solution

  • With default,utf8,umask=077,uid=44,gid=44 this in your FSTAB, the files should be owned by www-data. The ownership of files on mounted FAT partition is set by the mount command, and can't be changed after that; the partition itself can't record any changes to ownership.