"chmod" doesn't work

I had this same problem, the partition I was accessing was an ntfs partition mounted with ntfs-3g (with no permission support by default), and it took a while for me to remember that.

I would expect chmod to give me some warning, but it didn't just like in your case.

I know there is an option on fstab when using ntfs-3g to make it possible to set permissions in an ntfs partition as described here.

I hope it helps.

Try: sudo chmod -R -f 777 *

I think that can be a permission issue.

Are you sure your filesystem is not mounted read only ?

Type mount command to check. if there is ro in the mount options, you need to remount your filesystem with the following command :

mount -o rw /dev/ /mountpoint

You can also check which user owns the shell script.

If it's not "gemma" it could be the cause of the problem.