title: chown command returning Operation not permitted
body: <p>I am working on a raspberry pi and am having a tough time giving permissions to an external hard drive that I have mounted using the following tutorial:</p>
  
  <p><a href="http://www.howtogeek.com/139433/how-to-turn-a-raspberry-pi-into-a-low-power-network-storage-device/" rel="noreferrer">http://www.howtogeek.com/139433/how-to-turn-a-raspberry-pi-into-a-low-power-network-storage-device/</a></p>
  
  <p>I have now created folders on that external hard drive and when I do a <code>ls -l</code> command I get the following returned:</p>
  
  <pre><code>drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 512 Aug 28 23:24 test
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>That is located in: <code>/media/USBHDD1/shares</code></p>
  
  <p>Now I'm trying to give it all write read and execute permissions or even change the owner and group to pi:pi</p>
  
  <p>However, <code>chmod 777</code> is not working – it doesn't return an error, just seems to have no effect</p>
  
  <p>And when I use </p>
  
  <pre><code>sudo chown -R pi:pi test/
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I get the error</p>
  
  <pre><code>chown: changing ownership of `test/': Operation not permitted
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This is a linux question but I think someone with background and knowledge of using a raspberry pi can help me out here.</p>
  
  <p>Extra info as requested:</p>
  
  <p>When I run <code>pi@raspberrypi /media $  grep USBHDD1 /etc/mtab</code>
  it returns:</p>
  
  <pre><code>/dev/sda1 /media/USBHDD1 vfat rw,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=437,iocharset=ascii,shortname=mixed,errors=remount-ro 0 0
  </code></pre>