Anilrgowda

I have a Linux (Fedora Core) box that is hooked up to an external usb hard drive, the drive is shared on a windows network using samba, i can read off the drive fine but i can't write. I've tried changing the permissions using chmod g+w /share/usb but it ignores the command, also when i try to change the group i get "chgrp: changing group of `/share/usb': Operation not permitted" i get the same error when trying to change the owner. I'm doing this all as root so i don't see the problem with what i'm doing.

Soln
If you want user/group permissions on your usb drive you better create a linux
filesystem (ext3, reiser, xfs, ...) instead of a vfat/ntfs filesystem to get "native"
support for linux permissions.

If you really need a vfat/ntfs filesysem on your usb drive you lose the linux
user/group/permission capabilities, but you can assign userid+groupid and
permissions when mounting the filesystem (manually or in /etc/fstab).
Use the options uid=value, gid=value, umask=value to mount (more details
can be found by your friendly "man mount" command)