I have a dual boot RH8(ext3) WinXP(fat32) setup... when I try to copy files to the WinXP part(maounted as /WinXP) I get a read-only error... How do I make it so that it isn't read-only???

check your /etc/fstab to see if the partition is being mounted read-only. Take the 'ro' away and change the permissions if you need to.

/dev/hda1 /win_c vfat defaults 1 0

Lets me write to as root and copy from.

or at the prompt
mount -o remount,rw /WinXP

thanx. nxny.... didn't know where that file was... & allen kinda... new line:
/dev/hda4 /WinXP vfat defaults 1 1
now I ca write to it in any user. old line was:
/dev/hda4 /WinXP vfat defaults 0 0
THANK-YOU!

kierl, IMHO what you changed across the lines does not alter permissions. And from your old fstab line, you should have been able to write to the fs. So if you remounted the fs readwrite as whansard suggested when it was already supposed to be mounted rw( defaults = rw, suid, dev, exec, auto, nouser, async - see man mount ) , I dont know what has changed so you can write to the fs now.

You may want to change the line to say 0 0 instead of 1 1
Because you possible are not backing up this fs using dump. And you possibly dont want Linux to fsck this partition at every bootup.

Here's the relevant section of the fstab man page.

The fifth field, (fs_freq), is used for these filesystems by the
dump(8) command to determine which filesystems need to be dumped. If
the fifth field is not present, a value of zero is returned and dump
will assume that the filesystem does not need to be dumped.

The sixth field, (fs_passno), is used by the fsck(8) program to deter-
mine the order in which filesystem checks are done at reboot time. The
root filesystem should be specified with a fs_passno of 1, and other
filesystems should have a fs_passno of 2. Filesystems within a drive
will be checked sequentially, but filesystems on different drives will
be checked at the same time to utilize parallelism available in the
hardware. If the sixth field is not present or zero, a value of zero
is returned and fsck will assume that the filesystem does not need to
be checked.

Whatever the Shmeg I changed It works now where it didn't work before... but yeah, thanks I'l take a look at those man pages.

All stable Linux kernels don't like to write on NTFS partitions,
which is probably what your Windows XP is instlled on.
You'll have to re-compile the kernel to enable the experimental
NTFS write support... which is HIGHLY discouraged. Linux
still doesn't correctly perform writes on NTFS partitions,
and you would have to run scandisk after every time you modified
a file. It's not really even worth enabling. The best thing
to do is create a FAT32 partition for sharing files between
your Redhat system and Windows XP system. Linux has no prob
writing to FAT32, and Windows XP doesn't either. If having
XP installed on NTFS insn't a high priority for you, and you
just want it installed on FAT32, you could do that too to ease
Linux/Windows file sharing capability.

Wel... Hmmm... it works just fine if I'm logged in as root... so NTFS must be enabled my default in RH8... and yeah, you are right about how it should be discouraged... My XP crashed after I wrote to the partition through linux so I just dumped it... never really used it anyways...

I have a similar setup winxp(fat32)/mdk9.1 on a toshiba laptop. I finally managed to get vim to edit fstab so that I can rw to the fat32 partition, but only at c:\ , any deeper into the directory tree
and I get a no permissions message. I can live with this but I assume it can be changed. Need pointers please.

Edit your fstab ( vim kicks butt, but it is a tad confusing in the beginning stages . Try pico ) to add the uid/gid ( if you're only user who needs to read/write to the ntfs partition, this is better ) or umask option.

Something like
/dev/hd<disk,partition> /mnt/winxp ntfs defaults,rw,user,uid=500,gid=500,umask=027 0 0

Thanks nxny I can now rw to my fat32 sub-directories. Wish I had
found linux a year ago when I started computing. Enormous
power to the user!

Oui. Lots of power to the user... unfortunately there are still too many people out there who prefer that all the power go to Microsoft... ( Honestly, If you want something that's really easy then pick like RedHat or Peanut... Not Windows... Only thing windows is good for is syncing with Pocket PC(haven't gotten lin to do this yet) and playing Warcraft 3... The second of which can actually be accomplished in Lin but is kindof a pain in the derrier... BTW: You only started using computers a year ago??? You've kinda been slow getting started... Oh. and yes this is just a nonsense reply... I'm just really bored right now...