[gentoo-user] Cannot remove files: operation not permitted

[Jose Gonzalez Gomez]

Hi there,

I was trying to make a clean install on a disk with a previous installation of Gentoo on a reiserfs partition, but I wanted to keep some files. I thought I would be able to boot with the LiveCD, mount the partition, remove everything except the files I wanted to keep (moving them to a temporal directory) and then copy a stage3 to the partition.

After mounting the partition and trying to rm -rf a directory I got a "Cannot remove ... operation not permitted". After googlong a while I found about chattr, and although it seems this is a ext2/3 tool I tried it and I was able to remove some files after doing a chattr -ia on them. Any way, there are some files I'm not able to delete, and they seem to be non regular files (links, linux sockets,...). Any idea why this is happening?

Thanks in advance, best regards
Jose