So, I finially figured out how to get write permissions on my 2nd harddrive... I had to chmod the mount point (eg. chmod go+rwx /usr/pictures ), and that works.

However, after a restart, those chmod properties are undone and reverted back to their previous form, so I have to chmod them every time I want to write to the drive. Is there something I'm missing here? It doesn't sound like this is supposed to happen. Pasted below is my fstab if you need it for reference.

And how does noauto work? If the root mounts the filesystem, does only root have write access to that drive? So the only way the user gets write access if he has permission to mount the drive and he does it manually? Is there anything that I should add to my fstab that would be beneficial?

Thanks for any help!

/dev/hde1 / ext3 noatime 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
/dev/hde6 /home ext3 noatime 1 2
none /mnt/cdrom supermount dev=/dev/hda,fs=udf:iso9660,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-1 0 0
none /mnt/cdrom2 supermount dev=/dev/scd0,fs=udf:iso9660,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-1 0 0
none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=ext2:vfat,--,codepage=850,sync,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-1 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hdg7 /usr/backup ext3 user,exec,dev,suid 1 2
/dev/hdg5 /usr/media ext3 user,exec,dev,suid 1 2
/dev/hdg1 /usr/pictures ext3 user,exec,dev,suid 1 2
/dev/hdg6 /usr/storage ext3 user,exec,dev,suid 1 2
/dev/hde5 swap swap defaults 0 0

If you want ordinary users to be able to mount, put "user,noauto" in the fstab options. Mounting as root will not effect the ability of other users to write to the partition provided that the permissions are properly set on the mount point. For partitions with linux file systems, the rwx permisions are set through the mount point. However, for the permissions to flow down the entire partition, you must do the chmod while the partition is mounted. Using one of your data partitions as an example:

$ mount /mnt/media
$ su
<enter root password>
# chmod 1777 /mnt/media

rinse and repeat for the other data partitions.

That should do it. The trick is to remember to do chmod with the partition mounted and use 1777, instead of 777.

It gives me temporary write access, but then after a period of time (it doesn't seem to be anything else), it goes back to not being able to write to those points (the mount point permissions revert).

I'm running Mandrake 9.2 if that has any affect on it.

Its really annoying having to su and chmod 1777 it every time I want to write to it.

Anything else I should do? Would changing ownership affect anything?

That's really wierd. Something has to be changing the permissions back, particularly if they revert w/o rebooting or remounting. The only thing I can think of is some daemon running in connection with an overly high security setting, probably msec. In mandrake control center>security>draksec, check your security setting and if it's not set to "standard" or "high", reset it to one of these. Unless your running a server, you don't need anything greater than these and the "higher" and "paranoid" settings start to really impact usability.