I have just aquired a Lacie 120Gb external USB drive. It is formatted as FAT32. I want to use it to share info between my WinXP desktop and a project PC running SuSE 10.1 (they are not allowed to be networked).
Its OK on windows, but on SuSE (even logged in as root) it shows up as "Unmounted removeable media", however when I try to mount it or to look at its properties the system comes back with "Permission denied".
I have checked other posts, but nothing seems to quite explain or solve this, can anyone help?

If you do 'fdisk -l' or 'ls -l /dev/disk/by-id/' as root, can you see something that has either "usb" or /dev/sd" in the name?

Hi - thanks for quick reply.
I got following response...
------------------------------------------------------------------------
ldev3:~ # fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 20.4 GB, 20419854336 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2482 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 1 64 514048+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hda2 * 65 2482 19422585 83 Linux

Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 14593 117218241 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)

ldev3:~ # ls -l /dev/disk/by-id
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Mar 6 08:21 ata-Maxtor_52049H4_K40QNN0C -> ../../hda
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Mar 6 08:21 ata-Maxtor_52049H4_K40QNN0C-part1 -> ../../hda1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Mar 6 08:21 ata-Maxtor_52049H4_K40QNN0C-part2 -> ../../hda2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Mar 6 08:21 edd-int13_dev80 -> ../../hda
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Mar 6 08:21 edd-int13_dev80-part1 -> ../../hda1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Mar 6 08:21 edd-int13_dev80-part2 -> ../../hda2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Mar 6 14:14 usb-TOSHIBA_MK1237GSX_2C00BF6AFFFF -> ../../sda
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Mar 6 14:14 usb-TOSHIBA_MK1237GSX_2C00BF6AFFFF-part1 -> ../../sda1
ldev3:~ #

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Anything there that sheds any light?

Sure. Mounting it manually with something like 'mkdir /mnt/lacie && mount /dev/sda1 -t vfat /mnt/lacie' should work and if it always will reside at "/dev/sda" (meaning you don't attach another USB stick or drive before attaching this one) then adding a line in /etc/fstab fixes it. If you do mount other USB mass storage devices (and its kinda std these days anyway) it should be under control of devlabel (ancient) or Udev (new).

Thanks that works just fine.
Only slight snag (though it doesn't stop me doing anything) is that I could not create any directories in /mnt (I created my "lacie" directory in /), when i tried to create /mnt the system came back with "permission denied".
I was logged in as root and permissions look ok /mnt permissions are rwx-rxr-x. Could there be some other mechanism at work here that I am not aware of?

Maybe AppArmor?