Frustrating Mounting Problem


Last time I thought I have managed to settle the drives mounting problem on Ubuntu. But later I realized it was not 100 percent.

On /etc/fstab, my setting was

UUID=472C-857B /media/Zzz vfat user,auto,fmask=0777,dmask=0000 0 0

But in the end when I mounted a drive, on Properties of the drive, it was shown as read-only and permission allowed only for root.

On the terminal shown that it was read and write permission enabled.

vfat terminal

but on windows Properties:

 vfat windows 

Is there any explanation for this out there?

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  • gmarian
    The problem has to do with permissions. The partition is mounted by root, and so root has the read-write permission.

    To see what I mean:

    ls -l /media

    Solution:

    sudo chmod 777 /media/Zzz

    This will change the permissions so that anyone can read or write to it. Do it after mounting the partition. (So, if you were re-creating this setup, use this command after the "sudo mount -a" command.)



    The rest of this post is mostly for multi-user systems:

    Now, you might be thinking that this is dangerous. Anyone can write to that partition. Well, yes and no.

    Since you're using FAT32 for this partition, there isn't a way to set file permissions. So, that's basically the only way to use this type of file system. If you had multiple users logging into this computer (like if it was a server), everyone would have full access to any file on the FAT32 partition.

    If you were using a Linux partition type (like ext3) then, everyone would have access to the partition itself. They'd be able to create files and directories. However, since the file system understands Linux file permissions, it isn't like using the FAT32 file system. The user who created the file/directory is set as the owner and so has control over the permissions. This way, any user on the system can use this partition, but they won't be able to access other user's stuff on the partition, unless those users change the permissions to allow others access.



    There's nothing wrong with doing what you have done, for the typical desktop installation. In fact, I'm guessing that you're dual-booting and using this partition to allow you to transfer files between Linux and Windows.
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