I have recently made a clean installation of Red Hat 8.0 on a computer (my desktop) in a dual-boot arrangement shared with Windows Xp.

In addition to three Linux partitions, I have a FAT 32? partition that I share with Windows (My Documents?, etc.) As root,I have mounted that partition down in the file tree of one of the users (/home/username/nodename) by editing /etc/fstab. Since I created that directory as root, root is the owner. I have also shared that tree node via Samba over the network for other Windows computers (e.g. my laptop). It can be broused from the network - so far, so good.

Then I realize that I want the user, not root to be the owner of that shared partition. So, as root, in a terminal, I do

  # cd /home/username
  # ls     

nodename is shown in the list

  # etc/init.d/smb stop      'shut down Samba
  # chown username nodename  'try to change ownership

and I get the message "operation not permitted" so I try

  # umount /dev/hdb1         'the partition in question

and I get the message "device is busy". But nothing is using it and Samba has been shut down.

I'm stumped. What should I try next? Is there a way to tell why it's busy? -Hc