[CentOS] Setting Group owner of files on USB drive

Fri May 30 21:17:38 UTC 2008
Robert Moskowitz <rgm at htt-consult.com>

Matt Hyclak wrote:
> On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 04:37:58PM -0400, Robert Moskowitz enlightened us:
>   
>> I just got a 8Gb flash drive and went to copy a bunch of files onto it.  
>> I wanted to perserve everything, so I just took my archiving rsync 
>> command and altered it to go to localhost:/media/RALLY2/ (name of flash 
>> drive).  I am getting errors with changing the group owner.  Huh?
>>
>> So I try to just use mkdir to create a directory on the flash drive.  
>> The directory has a group of root ???
>>
>> So I try a chgrp and get:
>>
>> [root at mine me]# chgrp me /media/RALLY2/Stuff
>> chgrp: changing group of `/media/RALLY2/Stuff': Operation not permitted
>>
>>
>> OK why can't I set the group to something other than root?
>>
>> ls -lstr /media/
>> total 4
>> 4 drwxr-xr-x 3 me root 4096 May 30 16:28 RALLY2
>>
>> and of course for /media:
>>
>> 8 drwxr-xr-x   3 root root  4096 May 30 16:18 media
>>
>>     
>
> Most likely the device is formatted as FAT32, which has no concept of
> permissions.
>
> Reformat it, ignore the errors, or modify your rsync command to not preserve
> uid/gid.
Unfortunately, I have to use it on Win systems as well...