Re: Help with chmod

[Kevin Colby <kevinc grainsystems com>]

[Anyone confused about partitions, filesystems, or formatting, read this.]

Here is what I suspect you have done:

1. You have a drive partitioned and used by Windows.
2. Somehow this drive becomes used in a Linux machine.
3. The old partition(s) used by Windows are not changed in
   size or location, but may be now typed as "Linux Native".
4. The filesystems on these partitions are not recreated
   ("formatted"), but instead the partitions are mounted
   via the mount command by hand.

In this situation, because no type is specified by with the mount command
(/etc/fstab entries would have been type-specific), the mount command tries
to determine the correct filesystem type automatically.  It reads the
partition and determines that it is, in fact, a FAT (FAT16,FAT32,vfat,etc.)
partition and mounts it as such.  Because these filesystems do not support
extended permissions or even the concept of file ownership, chmod and chown
have no meaning to them.

Linux uses a number of different filesystems.  The current "standard" is
the "Extended Filesystem, version 2" or "ext2".  If you would like to use
this filesystem on a partition, after defining the partition, you must
create an ext2 filesystem on it ("format it").  This will result in the
loss of any information on the partition (not the drive).  You can do this
by executing 'mke2fs /dev/xxxx', where 'xxxx' is a specific partition.
Note:  Do NOT do this to a whole drive (i.e. "hdc")!

If, prior to mounting /dev/hdc1, you had executed "mke2fs /dev/hdc1",
you would have found an empty filesystem with full permissions and ownership
support when you mounted it.  Instead, you got the old DOS filesystem that
was there from before.  The clue here was to mount it with the "-t" type
specifier.  The fact that "-t vfat" mounts at all is a dead giveaway.
If this were really and ext2 filesystem, you would only have been able to
successfully mount it with "-t ext2" or none specified.

I suggest that you remove all contents of hdc1, unmount, mke2fs, remount,
and try this again.

	- Kevin Colby
	  kevinc grainsystems com