Can't change folder permissions on FAT32 partition-Mac OSX

Question

In have an external hard drive which has two partitions:

1. Mac OSX Extended Journaled
2. MS-DOS FAT

Basically if I select get info for any file/folder on the FAT partition, there is no option to change permissions under the sharing and permissions section.

Additionally when I try to chown or chmod the file/folder in terminal the command seems to work, but when I then try ls -l on the file/folder it becomes apparent the command hasn't done anything.

Please can someone help as I need to modify the permissions of the folder in order to start my database server.

Answer 1

The FAT32 volume format does not support storing file permissions, so there's inherently no way to set them. If your database server requires permissions, you'll have to move it to a volume that supports them -- on OS X, that means Mac OS Extended and its variants.