Ubuntu – How to set executable permissions on a removable drive

I guess your USB drive is formatted with VFAT/FAT32. This file format does not support execute permissions which is why chmod +x fails.

[Edit] Ok, had a bit of a play and search on the net. Lots of 'solutions' suggest that you should change /etc/fstab. This just seems clunky to me, what do you do? change fstab every time you encounter a new USB flash drive???

My solution:

$ sudo vi /etc/udev/rules.d/90-usb-disks.rules

Add the lines:

# UDEV Rules to change the permission of USB disks

#

KERNEL=="sd*[0-9]", ATTR{removable}=="1", ENV{ID_BUS}=="usb", MODE="0022"

$ sudo /etc/init.d/udev restart

Then try inserting a usb drive. There is probably an attribute that you can check for to ensure it's a FAT formatted drive if you wanted to be more specific.

Your problem seems to be about the permissions you have set. FAT / FAT32 formatted drives don't support file permissions. The permissions for everything are determined by how the drive is mounted. When you set the permission open it worked when you

server# sudo mount /dev/sdb2 /home/storage -o umask=000

As for it not auto mounting on reboot

UUID=8C52-C1CD /home/storage auto user,umask=000,utf8, -->noauto<-- 0 0

The "noauto" makes this NOT automatically mount when the system starts and parses the /etc/fstab file. Remove that option and it will mount on startup. You can set the permissions on the mount point once it's mounted with chmod or specify them in /etc/fstab.

If you need the media user to access it, you can set the permissions to 764, and add them to the security group. Root always has access to everything.

see http://www.linux.org/threads/file-permissions-chmod.4094/ for some examples of propper file permissions

On a side note, bodhi.zazen made a good point Is there some reason you need to use FAT ? If not, I would back up the data and use a linux native file system. You can then set ownership and permissions.