I'm trying to use a USB drive (FAT32) on my laptop running Ubuntu 14.04, but the permissions are messed up and I don't understand them well enough to fix it.
Running ls -l in /mnt shows
drwxrwxrwx 3 root root 16384 Dec 31 1969 usb SanDisk_Ultra_4C530001080718105394-0:0-part1
I'm pretty sure this indicates I've set all users to have all permissions (this is not the final configuration I'd like, but bear with me).
Despite this, I cannot copy files to the drive. When in Nautilus I check the Permissions tab under Properties (for the directory /mnt/usb-SanDisk_Ultra_4C530001080718105394-0:0-part1), it says that only root has write permissions, and that since root is the owner I cannot change that. Using sudo chmod, sudo chown, and sudo chattr all fail, which I don't quite understand but I think is related to the file system being FAT32. (This is a drive I'd like to use between multiple computers and operating systems, so I believe that I should stick with the file system.)
The entry in fstab reads
/dev/disk/by-id/usb-SanDisk_Ultra_4C530001080718105394-0:0-part1 /mnt/usb-SanDisk_Ultra_4C530001080718105394-0:0-part1 auto user,umask=001,dmask=000,nosuid,nodev,nofail,noauto,comment=x-gvfs-show,rw 0 0
I manually added the options user, umask, and dmask, and changed x-gvfs-show to comment=x-gvfs-show to fix an error that prevented the drive from mounting (a solution I found on these forums). Otherwise, all of the options were as I found them. I had already reformatted and repartitioned the drive multiple times before making any of these modifications. I'm out of ideas, and frustrated that it's so difficult to just use a thumb drive in a "plug and play" fashion, could anybody help?
EDIT: This question is not a duplicate, as the methods described in the answers to the other question do not fix my problem when I try them (see comments). In fact, even before trying it seems like the problem is different, since mounting manually or through fstab should function similarly and I had already laid out my fstab configuration, indicating the uniqueness of this problem.
