Did you do anything odd? Check /etc/passwd to make sure root is uid 0 still.

When you say anything, do you mean not just this directory and it's contents, but anything on your system?

Is this on RH?

lsattr /path/to/files

Show us what that brings up.

I only checked this dir, but im pretty sure thats it.

root uid is zero:Any other settings I should be aware of? Do you think i'll have to reinstall?

any files/folders in mnt it tells me:

No, I don't think you'll have to reinstall. I'm assuming that since you have them under /mnt that they are on a seperate device/partition than the rest of your system. What did you mount this device/partition with? If you've got a referring entry in /etc/fstab for this mount point, please post it.

Cool

What does 'mount' give you?

Also, if this is a removable device, what type is it? And what filesystem did you use to mount it?

just with the mount command in terminal

mount -t vfat /dev/hda5 /mnt/e

And thats it, did I forget to do something?

Btw, yes this is in RH (8.0)

Well you said it's a partition of another harddrive then the one running linux. Does that mean that it's also a different partition type like maybe FAT32. Because FAT32 can't handle permissions per file so you have to set default permissions for the whole partition. You can do that by editing the /etc/fstab file.

/dev/hda1 /mnt/c vfat defaults,uid=500,gid=500,noexec,nodev,nosuid,umask=002

This would make all the files on the partition owned by user-id 500 and group-id 500. The umask tells it to make all file permissions 775. Those are the most important ones which you have to play with.

Its a FAT partition of my main windows c HD

Ahhh, yes. We now see the problem I should have thought of this when you first mentioned /mnt

Yeah, you will need to also add a umask to be able to write to a fat32 filesystem. If you only want root to be able to write to it, a umask=022 will be sufficient.

I'd suggest doing this in /etc/fstab as this will make it easier for future use, so try an entry like this:
/dev/hda5 /mnt/e vfat users,auto,umask=022,rw 0 0

Then unmount and remount the drive with:
mount -a -o remount

This will unmount and mount the drive with the new permissions.



Cool

what umask do I specify if I want all users to access it?

If you want all users to have full r/w/x access a umask of 000 is equivilent to a chmod of 777.

Cool

still dont have write permission...I have changed the fstab file like you told me and I remounted like you told me

Subtract it. That's the easiest way to look at it. If you want to have something with a chmod of 555, then subtract it from 777, and that's your umask. So a chmod 555 is equal to a umask 222

HTH

still getting same errors. Something is so foked up here

// wait i just read ur last post, let me try it