Changing permissions with LiveCD

[davidev]

Hi all!

I am new to Linux... I searched the forum looking for an answer to my question, but there is something I don't understand.

I'm using the Knoppix 3.9 LiveCD.

I want to change the permissions in order to be able write on my HD.

In the shell, I type su root (it seemed to be no root pwd) , so I get the root access...

After obtained root access and gone in the /mnt directory I see this:

drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Sep 9 13:05 auto
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 Sep 9 12:54 cdrom -> /mnt/auto/cdrom
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 16 Sep 9 12:54 floppy -> /mnt/auto/floppy
dr-xr-xr-x 1 knoppix knoppix 8192 Sep 9 06:46 hda1

so, the owner of the HD is "knoppix" user. I tryed to change the ownership,

root@1[mnt]# chown root hda1

but I have this message:

chown: changing ownership of `hda1': Read-only file system

I obtain the same message also with chmod.

...so my question is: if I am root user, shouldn't I have full-access on the system? Shouldn't I do evereything I want?
The hda1 dir should be read-only just for the knoppix user and group, shouldn't it?!

Thanks for all the answers you would give me!!

[Harry Kuhman]

You are going at it completely wrong.

There are 2 ways I have made changes to write to the hard disk (do not try to write to NTFS partitions, you will destroy the partition).

1) At a command promp, use the mount command to remount the partition as read/write. See man mount for details.

2) From the desktop and the GUI: Right click on the partition icon. Select the actions ... sub-menu. Make the partition writeable.