Can't use chown on mounted drive for Raspberry Pi, help?

edit: Resolved, turns out my drive was formatted as vfat, a filesystem that doesn't support POSIX attributes. Reformatting it as ext4 fixed things.

Hi all,

I am trying to set up Samba and have mostly gotten it working. However, when I try to make a directory inside the shared directory, I get a permission denied error. This occurs whether I do it through smb or when ssh'd as the user.

ls -l /mnt shows the following permissions:

drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 32768 Dec 31 1979 shares 

When I do sudo chmod 777 /mnt/shares, I don't get any error messages, but if I do ls -l /mnt, the permissions do not seem to change.

I then tried chowning the directory and get this response:

chown: changing ownership of ‘/mnt/shares’: Operation not permitted chown: changing ownership of ‘/mnt’: Operation not permitted 

What's going on here? This directory is a mount of an external HDD connected to my Raspberry Pi. I find it odd that I can neither chmod nor chown this directory. I've even tried suing into root and chowning the directory, but to no avail.