Cannot delete directories on fat32 filesystem under leopard

Posted by kain Sun, 24 Aug 2008 15:19:00 GMT

FAT32 formatted drives can not handle unix permissions at all.

You can not do chown, chmod or any of that stuff. In particular, if a file was locked in windows, it will be read as having an immutable flag in OS X. The only way to change it is by mounting the drive in windows.

You must open a dos window from inside windows and type:

attrib -r -s c:\foldername

and hit enter.

If you have long folder names or ones with spaces in the name it gets a little tricky guessing at the dos name equivilant ~1 etc. If you can’t get the dos name on any folders then rename the folder to a 8 letter name first then run the attrib command. Afterwards when you boot back into leopard, the locked check marks will be gone.

From pperret http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7090349

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