I added NTFS support on my dualboot system (XP and Fedora) and mounted the NTFS to /mnt/cdrive. However I cannot chown or chmod the directory. Ultimately I want to be able to set things up to mount and change all access to read upon boot, but I cannot figure out how to allow my nonroot users access?

Note: the actual error message is "failed to change mode of 'cdrive' to 0444"

Thank!

Viewing and Modifying the contents of another partition could be looked at as a pretty risky process if you have mission critical or confidential data. I mean potentially if you created a user account that could log on under fedora and read and write to your NTFS volume, your NTFS volume could be compromised. that is why i believe that the NTFS modules are currently only available with read support and write support is still experimental (until kernel 2.6 officially comes out) for just root.

I'd imagine there is a way to change the permissions of a user in the file /etc/shadow, but really administrative stuff should really be done as root. i mean sure it's a couple extra steps, to change the permissions on files, but really, it's not THAT bad is it? i mean other than document files what good is a windows partition anyway? you can do everything in linux you can do in windows. and more. however, if your a windows gamer you have to install wineX to play your games and that can cost you money (morally at least that is).

You need to modify the /etc/fstab file for the NTFS partition.
Add user option for a regular user to mount and umask=0222 for users to read only.

Thanks for the info.

The reason I want to do this is because I have alot of audio and images on my NTFS partition that I don't really want to have redundancy on my relatively small 30GB laptop harddrive.

Thanks!

You can also just put 'ro' as an option to make it read-only (you'll probably still need umask= to let regular users look at it). Set ownership via the uid=[user] & gid=[group] options.

I was in the exact same situation just a few days ago. I ended up adding my NTFS to /etc/fstab

You should add a line that looks something like this:
/dev/hda1 /windows ntfs ro,user,uid=500 0 0

Where /dev/hda1 is your hard drive (hda for primary master, hdb for primary slave etc) and /windows is /mnt/cdrive

I really wish Linux had stable NTFS write :sigh:

I know this thread is a couple months old but I added the unmask=0222 to my /etc/fstab file and it gave my user acct access to my NTFS partition witha ll of my music on it but no files or folders show up.

If I go to the same partition as root, i am able to navigate it and play my music files. what should I add to the line to be able to view the files in the partition. I cant remember exactly what it says now (im at work) but it does have "ro" and the "unmask=0222" in the line.