read and write permission for FAT32 partition in Ubuntu

Question

This is a strange problem. I have the following partition table

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1          13      102400    7  HPFS/NTFS
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2              13        5737    45978624    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3            5738       10600    39062047+  83  Linux
/dev/sda4           10601       19457    71143852+   5  Extended
/dev/sda5           10601       11208     4883728+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6           11209       15033    30720000    b  W95 FAT32
/dev/sda7           15033       19457    35537920    7  HPFS/NTFS

I dual boot Win7 (sda2) and Ubuntu (sda3) and wanted to use the FAT32 partition to share files across two OS's.

I followed some online tutorial and have done these:

sudo mkdir /media/FAT32
sudo chmod 777 /media/FAT32
sudo mount /dev/sda6/ /media/FAT32

after I mounted the file, I can only read but not be able to write to it.

I checked the file permission, it becomes:

drwxr-xr-x

but after I unmounted the it then becomes

drwxrwxrwx

and I can read and write to it.

I don't know where I've down wrong.

Answer 1

Try mounting with rw and specify the type:

mount -t vfat /dev/sda6 /media/FAT32 -o rw,uid=xxx,gid=xxx

where uid and gid are that of your user account.

Answer 2

You have the wrong order on the commands you want:

sudo mkdir /media/FAT32
sudo mount /dev/sda6 /media/FAT32
sudo chmod 777 /media/FAT32

What is happening is that /media/FAT32 represents different directories before and after the mount. Before it's the directory you made, and which you chmod'ed 777. After, it's the root directory of the filesystem in /dev/sda6.

Answer 3

If you simply forget about command line and mount with Nautilus, it should set it as you want.

From the terminal, the permissions of the folder before mounting doesn't matter. It's the mount options that count. Try:

mount -t vfat /dev/sda6 /media/FAT32 -o rw,uid=xxx,gid=xxx,umask=133,dmask=022

This will set files to rw-r--r-- and folders to rwxr-xr-x.

If you want other user/group and permissions, for instance to copy files from fat32 to the ext4 partition with the desired attributes, better consult the mount manpage. Roughly you put on umask the opposite of what you would put on chmod.

Answer 4

For FAT filesystems, read/write availability is governed by the mount options.

Consult the manpage for mount and read about uid and gid mount options for FAT.

Answer 5

Have you tried writing to the files with a sudo command? That should work with your current setup.

To get file writes for your normal user working, you need to use the uid and gid options to mount, to set the owner of files on the partition to your current userID. You probably also want either umask or dmask and fmask options.

Your mount command would look like this:

sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sda6 /media/FAT32 -o uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=022
# assuming your user's UID is 1000, GID is 1000
# umask=022 sets permission mode 755 for all files on the partition

Answer 6

Without manually mount, an fstab line do the trick,

UUID=1DD9-0D44 /media/exthd/TERABYTE_G vfat rw,noatime,uid=1000,gid=1000,user 0 0

(uid,gid are of your user, /media/exthd/TERABYTE_G must be pre-created)

but note, mount -a seems not applying properly to test the new fstab line, so a full reboot helps.

Answer 7

Very important repair/check the disk under windows before using it on linux, by default fat/ntfs drivers disable write if they find errors on the disk

chkdsk d: /f 

Then

sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sdc1 /media/FAT32 -o rw,uid=$(id -u),gid=$(id -g)

as motioned before

Answer 8

Sometimes I lost the windows disk from Linux and I solved using mount with "-o force", as this example:

sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /media/win -o force

In your case, being FAT32 you should read about, but my be this tip help. Anyway, try at your own risk!

Answer 9

I had exactly the same problem and the only thing that actually worked is:

sudo mount -t vfat  /dev/sda6 /media/FAT32 -o rw,umask=0000

See also that answer