I wasn't quite sure where this thread should go...
anyways. I'm running gentoo linux with kde and I was wondering why my day-to-day user couldn't mount my ntfs partition. my current fstab looks like this:

/dev/hda1 /mnt/ntfs ntfs ro,user,gid=1000 0 0

as you can see the ntfs is on a different hard disk(i'm running a dual-boot system).
I made a group called ntfs with id 1000. I would like to see it so that anyone in that group could mount and access the drive, but only people in the group. right now it says only the root can mount the drive. then when i do mount the drive no one else can access it. thank you for the help.

just execute mount without parameters
to see if the ntfs partition is mounted. Even a mere mortal user can do so.
If you add it to the fstab, the users don't need to mount it anymore.
Make sure that the directory (=mount point) /mnt/ntfs exists.

as a user, just cd /mnt/ntfs and look if
you can see the files.

Not entirely true. if you place the "noauto" option in fstab then it will not mount on boot. I'm trying to make it so that only a certain group can access it. i.e. people in group 1000(ntfs) can read the partition. the mount point is made. I need to make sure that it is read-only as well.

I think what I'm trying to say is how do I set the umask so that it only allows the user and group read access but not everything else?

the umask is for writing only.

I think its sufficient to
chmod 750 /mnt/ntfs
and
chown root.ntfs /mnt/ntfs

Users not member of ntfs should get acces denied on cd /mnt/ntfs
mounting with the ro option makes the partition read-only even for root.