usb pendrive problem with file ownership or something

[jur]

I just made a usb stick with tc on it, but there are some problems. During booting, I get a whole string of messages that say something about "chown" not permitted on home folders/files... then on running rox, it complains about being unable to create icon symlinks, and there are no icons in rox, only "yield signs". Running rox as root has no problem.

Also if I try to edit a text file it warns about it being "world-readable" and offers to fix it but that fails.

I have a suspicion all these symptoms are related. How do I fix this? I have already tried various tc versions, clean installs from scratch, deleting /home and /opt, and nothing has made any difference.

Searching here hasn't yielded anything.

Please help?

[Jason W]

Is your pendrive fat formatted?

[jur]

I tried several ways with that too... first using unetbootin, then booting from a cd and using tc's usbinstall. same result. It's fat32, according to Windows. It's a 4GB stick.

[Jason W]

And are you using it for mounted /home?

[jur]

Yes.

[Juanito]

For the last few years, I've booted tc (and before that, dsl) from many usb sticks - the one thing that has worked consistently and never given problems is to format the usb stick ext2 and boot with extlinux

[Jason W]

Mounted home will not work with fat format as fat does not store "per file" permissions which are vital to Linux.

[jur]

Ah I see. I will try to make a small ext2 2nd partition and mount /home on that.