Got etch running nicely. But I have an issue I would like to work out, not necessarily Debian issue but did't have this before in Mandrake. I've got 3 partitions extra on my machine. hda1 is the windows drive, hdb1 is Windows D: and hda2 is an archive drive I use for data storage and transfers (formated ext2). Now I've got the permisions set on all those drives to allow group read writes and they are in the disk group which has all my users as part of that group. However when I put auto in fstab for each drive the drive permissions switch to root owner and root group. Making the drives unwritable to users. Then if I manually unmount the drives the permission reverts to what I set it as.

Now I find if I put noauto in fstab and they aren't mounted at boot, I can mount them manually as user and can read write fine.

Now I would like to have these drives mounted with wr permissions for users in group disk as the family isn't as tekkie as me about mounting and unmounting. So am I missing something? Any ideas?

You should be able to set the gid in fstab to always boot the drive as that group permissions.

Replace the "auto" entry under "options" with either "defaults" or "user,noauto".

That's the point. I did do that. But that's also the problem. I want the drives to mount auto with user permissions. All three drives have rw,user,noauto for now. SO I can mount them and write to them as user. But I want them already mounted on boot. I did try setting the gid but that didn't help either. Still when they are mounted at boot the permissions are switched to owner root and group root.

Oh, do you mean change the gid of the fstab file itself? Not just the drive dirs in /mnt? I'll try that.

Not of the fstab file. in the fstab file, where you have user,rw,auto add gid=xxxx (the gid of your disk group).