Debugging Linux chown operation not permitted

yes, even for root!

Main reason this happens is usually the permissions themselves.

If you ain’t root you won’t be able to change an external hard drive mounted without custom permissions.

TLDR; become r00t (root) !

TLDR 2; or just RTFM and man tf outta mount!

man mount

wait, you didn’T solve my PROBLEM!!

well, then, you are in some luck. You probably have a file system that doesn’t allow permissions. These file systems include fat, vfat, fat32, and others. These file systems may complain when trying to change permissions, so just chown the root directory in which your external storage device is mounted at and you’ll probably be good to go in order to add files without being root.

That is all. Thanks for reading my ted talk.