i'm trying to get my fat32 drive (which i use to hold my mp3s collection for both windows and linux) mounted on this new ubuntu distro, debian-based, i believe. my fstab line looks like this:

/dev/hdb3 /mnt/vfat vfat auto,user 0 0

now, when i mount this drive it does appear on my desktop (as well as when i start the computer, obviously) but when i open the drive with the gui i get gnome footprint icons instead of folder icons. each time i right-click on one to look at user permissions, it disappears. when i try to access it through xmms the vfat folder is apparently un-expandable... what gives?

not to mention that when i CAN get songs to play through whatever degree of tinkering i find a bunch of fsck files and folders when i go back into windows. one time windows had to run scandisk or something of that kind just get several albums out of these fsck folders.

what gives?

/dev/hdc1 /mnt/hdc1 vfat default 0 0

try something like that

Do you have vfat support in your kernel? Run:
If you get no output then run:
and try again. If you get an error then it's compile a new kernel time...

You could use the uid= or gid= option in the fstab entry to make yourself the user/group owner of the partition.

You can even use your user name instead of your uid number.

I have an identical problem.
The vfat filesystem is installed, you can CD in through console, and copy files individually, but that isnt any good for playing all my mp3s.
My fstab has "/dev/sda5 /share vfat defaults 0 0" as the entry for that mount.
Any ideas?

using the mount options "defaults" or "auto,user" didn't work. i realized that xmms could get to the drive, though, if i launched xmms from root right after tinkering with my fstab, so i used the line "user=erik" instead. worked. oh well.

just wondering (its been a while), how do i see my uid/gid as well as what groups i am a member of from the terminal?