Permissions – How to Change File Permissions on a FAT32 Drive

fat32permissions

I have Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx).

I've noticed recently every file on my hard drive gets the executable privilege, even every text files, so when I open it a pop-up window asks me what to do (run in terminal-Display-Cancel-Run).

I tried to change permissions in the terminal as sudo chmod a-x -Rv /media/D/*. It shows me that privileges have been changed to 666 which means rw-rw-rw, but actually nothing has been done; it's still as executable privilege given.

I tried to move some files to the desktop. Then did as above, and it was successful.

My hard drive is formatted as "FAT32". What would be the problem?

Best Answer

FAT32 formatted drives do not support file permissions. The permissions for everything are determined by how the drive is mounted.

So, you can change the permissions on all the files on the drive by mounting it differently, but not dynamically like you are describing.

See https://askubuntu.com/a/96929/6161 on how to remount using different permissions.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to change permissions on a FAT32 formatted drive

vfat does not support Linux permissions. You can set permissions manually when you mount the device.

Unmount the flash drive from nautilus, but do not remove it.

sudo mkdir /media/flash
sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /media/flash -o dmask=000,fmask=111

You can possibly work around the issue if you use NTFS on the flash drive, and in that case mount it with the permissions option.

sudo mkdir /media/flash
sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /media/flash -o permissions

With the permissions option chown and chmod should work.

See man mount

Other options might be to use ext2 on the flash drive (smaller overhead) and the fs-driver on windows

http://www.fs-driver.org/

Ubuntu – No Read/Write Permission as User on a Secondary Drive

Another quick solution:

Run 'gksu nautilus' (use 'Ctrl+alt+T' for quick access to terminal)
Go to the /media folder in the file system.
Then right click the drive, and go into properties
Under the permissions tab change the permissions to read/write, and make sure 'owner' and 'group' are set to "your user name" instead of "root".
Then click "Apply permissions to enclosed folders."

(you may have to 'sudo apt-get install nautilus')

You should be able to access the folder from your user account without root access.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to change permissions on a FAT32 formatted drive

Ubuntu – No Read/Write Permission as User on a Secondary Drive

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