chown - Operation not permitted even as root user

I'm trying to chown a specific USB drive folder that has been mounted on my RPI 400.

This is my lsblk -f result:

sda1 exfat 1.0 WD Media 0C23-43CD 1.8T 0% /mnt/WD Media

And when I try to run as a root (at least according to whoami command) sudo chown -R 1000:1000 /mnt/WD\ Media/TV\ Shows/ I get the following error

chown: changing ownership of '/mnt/WD Media/TV Shows/': Operation not permitted

I think I need this because sonarr can't write there

Thanks!

1 Answer

exfat doesn't support file ownership. There's no place to record it in the bits being stored on the USB drive, so Linux gives you an error when you attempt to change them.

Try mounting with uid=1000,gid=1000, which presents all the files and directories as owned by the user you're using. That should allow all programs run by that user to write to it.

Alternatively, you could use umask=0000, which presents all the files and directories as 777 (all users can read and write).