[Tfug] Bizarre permissions situation...

[Jim March]

Y'all will love this one.

I'm running Karmic 64bit on my Dell lappy.  I got ahold of a new ("to
me") MP3 player, a Sandisk E260.  Has 4gigs of flash formatted FAT32.

In order to mount it I have to do a terminal number:

sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /media/disk

OK...but then I don't have permissions for it as a regular user.

No problem, I do "gksudo nautilus" and try and reset
permissions/ownership for /media/disk...it won't let me.  Huh?
Arright, so assuming Nautilus has lost it's mind, I try the same with
Thunar.  No joy there either - even running it as "god" it won't reset
permissions.  It WILL let me read from and write to the device using
GUI tools under gksudo...just won't let me reset permissions.

So figuring my GUI has gone kerpooey somehow, I jump to the terminal,
and get this:

---
jim at thecritter:/media$ chown jim /media/disk
chown: changing ownership of `/media/disk': Operation not permitted
jim at thecritter:/media$ sudo chown jim /media/disk
[sudo] password for jim:
chown: changing ownership of `/media/disk': Operation not permitted
jim at thecritter:
---

What...the...hell?  It's as if I don't have root access anymore.

Except...I do!  I can do "sudo nautilus" and drop a blank test file
into places like /bin I normally don't have access to...then go in
normally, try and delete, permission failure.  So sudo/gksudo are
*working*...just not on this flash device.

Whaaaaaaaa!

:)

Seriously, WTF?

Jim