can't change ownership of folder

English Install/Boot/Login
1

New install of Leap. A couple of the folders/partition mounts were set up as root. I need to change ownership, but it says it can’t. What’s up and how do I change these folders I want to use as a common, shared folder?

chown -hR dad /windoze-D
chown: changing ownership of ‘/windoze-D’: Operation not permitted
2

I assume that on /windoze-D there is a non-linux file system mounted (you forgot to provide any information about that, thus it is a guess initiaited by the strange name of the directory). And as non-Linux file systems do no support file ownership, it is impossible to change what isn’t there.

What you see as owners (and permissions) are all faked. The setting of these fakes are done by options on the mount. Thus wehn you want to change that, use other parameters in the mount command (or use other parameters in /etc/fstab).

3

If, and only if, you have an NTFS partition mounted via fstab (/etc/fstab), you could change the entry in fstab to like this:

/dev/sdxy    /windoze-D    ntfs-3g    uid=dad,gid=users,umask=0022    0 0

But to get a confident version of the line above we would need to see the parameters in the line that exists currently in fstab for windoze-D. So can you please open fstab and copy back to this thread the line that has “/windoze-D” in it. Then we can proceed.

4

thanks all. You are correct, windoze-D is a shared file between the two OS’s and is vfat. We use Linux 99% of the time, but there is one program for taxes that will not run on linux. I know I can use openbox, but in a new install am taking it one step at a time.

fstab

UUID=95560983-e4b1-42a7-87b3-b2e20c8feb77 swap                 swap       defaults              0 0
UUID=168ec5bb-427d-4a62-aff8-2b717cf123c7 /                    ext4       acl,user_xattr        1 1
UUID=55b0c1c2-9db5-4dcb-8250-54a8727879d6 /data                ext4       defaults              1 2
UUID=b0b0e582-f069-48ac-b09f-4ae5a1e23cea /home                ext4       defaults              1 2
UUID=6880aded-6603-458d-b495-0459349b1cbe /local               ext4       defaults              1 2
UUID=4aa39fe9-ccc1-4d56-a732-9984d129d8fe /mint                ext4       acl,user_xattr        1 2
UUID=4531-DA33       /windoze-D           vfat       users,gid=users,umask=0002,utf8=true 0 0
UUID=F84ECD3B4ECCF402 /windoze-C           ntfs-3g    users,gid=users,fmask=133,dmask=022,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 0

What I need to do to windoze-D is to backup everything on it and make it either ntfs or ex-fat (?) or something both OS can acess. Any suggestions? I have read that making a tarball would be the best way to keep it in tact to that end. If you have any suggestions there, I’d be glad to hear them. The bottom line is I need a shared folder.

thanks

5

My impression is that you do not quite understand what we said. It does not matter if it is VFAT or NTFS or another Windows file system. Linux can access all of them. And the fact that they do not support ownership/permissions is shared by all of them.

Please re-read the posts above. They should give you the key to how to change the entry in /etc/fstab with parameters like uid= and gid=. Read also

man 8 mount

specialy the paragraph “Mount options for fat”.

6

thank you, will do.

7

got it, thanks. I tarball’ed all of the data in that folder, and reformatted to ntfs. Needed to do that for some other issues. Then added the uid&gid above, and we are back up and running. Thank you both.

8

how do I mark this as solved?

9

Not.

You already posted above that you are fine.