Linux: Creating hard links on a portable music player

Question

Whenever I try to create a link on my 16GB Walkman to another file on the Walkman, I get the error "Operation not permitted". This happens whether I'm trying to create a hard or soft link, and whether I'm sending the command as myself or as root (with sudo). Does anyone know why I can't do this and if there is any way around it?

Answer 1

Music players are usually formatted as FAT16 or FAT32, neither of which supports soft or hard links. There is no filesystem-level way around this.

Answer 2

You're going to need both filesystem and OS support for softlinks, hardlinks or symlinks. Most portable media players use really simple filesystems underneath, fat32 for players that are accessible as a mass storage devices (or MTP), or various vendor specific filesystems for ptp, and basic OSes. If it was one of the newer android based players, then it would use an ext varient and this might work.

While, in theory you could reformat a mass storage class device to a file system that supports these features, the simple OS on most PMPs wouldn't support it. That said, this sounds like an XY problem - you might be able to get a better solution by focusing on why you want/need to link that file.