I'm sure it's something simple. I dual boot and keep my data on a vfat partition. It's easy to spot in my fstab below: /dev/hda8 /data.

I can only get to the directory as root, or by su, or sudo. I can't access it with my normal user account, which is what I want to do.

I'm running debian testing 3.1.


# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda5 / reiserfs notail 0 1
/dev/hda6 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hda8 /data vfat defaults 0 0
/dev/hdd /media/cdrom0 iso9660 ro,user,noauto 0 0
/dev/hdc /media/cdrom1 iso9660 ro,user,noauto 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto 0 0

This is quite possibly one of the most frequently asked questions on this forum.

To be concise, you can use the following line in /etc/fstab for mounting it.
umask=000 is the keypoint. The umask specifies the bits that should NOT be set when setting up the permissions for a fat partition.

Other related threads that may be of interest:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=273736
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=283509