MacOS – Can’t Change Folder Permissions on FAT32 Partition

chmodchownmacospermissions

In have an external hard drive which has two partitions:

  1. Mac OSX Extended Journaled
  2. MS-DOS FAT

Basically if I select get info for any file/folder on the FAT partition, there is no option to change permissions under the sharing and permissions section.

Additionally when I try to chown or chmod the file/folder in terminal the command seems to work, but when I then try ls -l on the file/folder it becomes apparent the command hasn't done anything.

Please can someone help as I need to modify the permissions of the folder in order to start my database server.

Best Answer

The FAT32 volume format does not support storing file permissions, so there's inherently no way to set them. If your database server requires permissions, you'll have to move it to a volume that supports them -- on OS X, that means Mac OS Extended and its variants.

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