How to mount vfat drive on Linux with ownership other than root?
- by Norman Ramsey
I'm running into trouble mounting an iPod on a newly upgraded Debian Squeeze.
I suspect either a protocol has changed or I've tickled a bug, which I don't know where to report.
I'm trying to mount the iPod so that I have permission to read and write it.
But my efforts come to nothing:
$ sudo mount -v -t vfat -o uid=32074,gid=6202 /dev/sde2 /mnt
/dev/sde2 on /mnt type vfat (rw,uid=32074,gid=6202)
$ ls -l /mnt
total 80
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 16384 Jan 1 2000 Calendars
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 16384 Jan 1 2000 Contacts
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 16384 Jan 1 2000 Notes
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 16384 Jun 23 2007 Photos
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 16384 Jun 19 2007 iPod_Control
$ sudo umount /mnt
$ sudo mount -v -t vfat -o uid=nr,gid=nr /dev/sde2 /mnt
/dev/sde2 on /mnt type vfat (rw,uid=32074,gid=6202)
$ ls -l /mnt
total 80
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 16384 Jan 1 2000 Calendars
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 16384 Jan 1 2000 Contacts
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 16384 Jan 1 2000 Notes
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 16384 Jun 23 2007 Photos
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 16384 Jun 19 2007 iPod_Control
As you see, I've tried both symbolic and numberic IDs, but the files persist in being owned by root (and only writable by root).
The IDs are really mine; I've had the UID since 1993.
$ id
uid=32074(nr) gid=6202(nr) groups=6202(nr),0(root),2(bin),4(adm),...
I've put an strace at http://pastebin.com/Xue2u9FZ, and the mount(2) call looks good:
mount("/dev/sde2", "/mnt", "vfat", MS_MGC_VAL, "uid=32074,gid=6202") = 0
Finally, here's my kernel version from uname -a:
Linux homedog 2.6.32-5-686 #1 SMP Mon Jun 13 04:13:06 UTC 2011 i686 GNU/Linux
Does anyone know if
I should be doing something different, or
If there is a workaround, or
If this is a bug, where it should be reported?
