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Re: USB HD permissions query



Brad Rogers:
> 
> I'm curious as to why, when I change the filesystem type to ext3 on a
> USB hard drive, I cannot write to the drive from normal user space,
> only root access is allowed.

When mounting a filesystem on a directory, say, /mnt/test, the
filesystem's root directory "covers" the old directory /mnt/test, which
probably lives on your root filesystem. That means you're dealing with
two directories with distinct permissions. When you are using ext2/3 (or
any other UNIX file system), these permissions are stored inside the
filesystem you mount and can only be changed after mounting. When using
FAT, you have to give permissions as a mount option (if you don't want
everything to be owned root:root) because FAT doesn't know the concept
of file ownership.

J.
-- 
I am getting worse rather than better.
[Agree]   [Disagree]
                 <http://www.slowlydownward.com/NODATA/data_enter2.html>

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