Ive tried editing the fstab so that it would mount my external HD at boot, but it always is restricted to root, or not mounted at all. Ill post the fstab as it is now. Ive tried changing it according to a how to I found in search, but it didnt work, so I tried some other changes to no avail. Here is my fstab:

/dev/hda5 / ext3 noatime 1 1
/dev/hda7 /home ext3 noatime 1 2
/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom iso9660 user,iocharset=iso8859-1,noauto,ro,exec 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows ntfs umask=0,nls=iso8859-1,ro 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda6 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/sda1 /mnt/RAID0 ntfs pamconsole,exec,utf8,noauto,user,iocharset=iso8859-1,managed 0 0

what's the line relative to your external HD in this? Is it the /dev/sda1 one?

In any case, what is the filesystem of the drive?

sda1 is the USB drive, and its in NTFS.

You have quite lot of options on that line, some I don't even know...
Whatever, have you tried adding "uid=<your user>" and "umask=000" ? Thus, make sure you _never_ try to write on this NTFS drive from linux, this wuold likely to corrupt the filesystem. You better add the "ro" flag as well.

Ill try that. I dont know what the pamconsole and utf8 mean, or the managed at the end. Everything else Ive got figured out. Any ideas on those?

UTF8 is a type of charater set encodage or something like this... I really doubt you need this. Pamconsole probably has something to do with authentification but I can't tell you exactly.

There is probably some informations about these in "man mount"

Do you think I would be safe to get rid of them? I was considering changing it to:
/dev/sda1 /mnt/RAID0 ntfs,ro,auto,user,iocharset=iso8859-1,managed 0 0

and see if that would work

If i understand correctly you edited the fstab adding the /dev/sda1 but it doesn't get mounted at boot.

1) you don't need all these options but anyway it doesn't have anything to do with the mounting of it.
Do you have any linux binaries in this partition ? if not the "exec" flag is not needed.
"noauto" is the culprit for not being automatically mounted at boot time. If you want it to be mounted automatically remove it.
"user" means that a user can mount it. (If you remove noauto then it would be mounted automatically so user has no meaning)
"iocharset" is deprecated the new name is "nls" and i believe iso8859-1 is the default nls so it is not needed

So, bottom line if you want the partition mounted at boot time remove "noauto,user"

Ok, got it to mount at boot. At the beginning it gives an error about "special device /dev/sda1 does not exist"

I cant figure out why, since it still mounts the drive. Here is my fstab:
/dev/hda5 / ext3 noatime 1 1
/dev/hda7 /home ext3 noatime 1 2
/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom iso9660 user,iocharset=iso8859-1,noauto,ro,exec 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows ntfs umask=0,nls=iso8859-1,ro 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda6 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/sda1 /mnt/RAID0 ntfs umask=0,nls=iso8859-1,ro 0 0

ok, now its not mounting at all. My fstab is the same as above. Now what?

"pamconsole" is added from Supermount in Mandrake...

Also being a USB device It seems would be a "hotplug" issue but I don't have a USB HD to test...

You may want to just use a mount script and have it run on startup...

KC

Do you mean on boot or even when you try manually? You better not mess with fstab unless you found out the correct options to add to it, what does "mount -t ntfs -o umask=0,nls=iso8859-1,ro /dev/sda1 /mnt/RAID0" tell you, any error message? ?

Its a SCSI issue on my new kernel. I must have taken out one of the drivers. It mounts fine on my other kernel.