I finally got manually mounted my 250 gig external hard drive...everything is working except that I can't delete or write to the drive from any user other than SU. I'm not sure what I did wrong or how to fix it....my /etc/fstab for the device looks like this

/dev/sda1 /media/external vfat
defaults,users,auto,umask=000 0 0

I'm kind of a newbie so if anyone knows how to fix this problem please attempt to explain it kind of in detail....sorry if this is an inconvenience...I've tried a few things and nothing seems to be working. THANK YOU


djljjm

The umaks=000 should take care of it and I'm not sure why it doesn't.
What exactly are the permissions when you mount it? Do an ls -ld /media/external after you mounted it and post the result.
Also, why don't you just mount the drive with the user that you want to use it with? That's usually what you do when you specify the 'user' option in the fstab. So don't do it as root, rather mount it with your regular user.

ls -ld on device came up with the following
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Apr 4 09:43 /mnt/external

I tried mounting it as non su and it gave me the following error
mount: only root can do that

As a regular user you need to run 'mount /media/external'. If the fstab entry really has a 'user' in the options field, this should work just fine.

I did this..."mount /media/external (new place mounted) and it gave the error which I listed before.

Hi djljjm,

Just a thought.... is this entry in the fstab actually splitted into 2 lines?

yes it is, is this a problem? I have another drive (actually a partition on my first drive) that is in two lines and works fine

What do you mean by new place mounted? You really only have to type mount /media/external, because then mount looks everything up in /etc/fstab. If you give mount two arguments, then it thinks it is a manual mount, which only root can do.

No, it has to be one line. What might be happening to you is that some editors display it as "two" lines if the line is too long for your current console, but nonetheless it has to be one line and it still might be even though it is displayed as two lines. What editor are you using?

gedit

tried one line and same error came up

IT WORKED! Thanks! I've had at least 10 people try to help me and that was the problem...one line...thanks again

You're welcome , glad it works now.