[ale] SuSE NewbieQ 2: How to change file and directory permissions?

[Mills.J at ems-t.com (Mills, John M.)]

ALErs -

Still bumping the furniture in my new SuSE-9.3 installation.

I created a mutually-accessible partition between WinXP and Linux and
formatted it as vfat. I can read it from Win and Lin environments, but I
can't set permissions to allow ordinary Linux users to create or change
files in that partion.

Even 'root' is refused permission to 'chmod' or 'chgrp' on that partition.

How might I change access permissions to my shared partition?

TIA.

 - Mills