FAT32 and Grub Problems...
 

God knows that "writing to FAT32" is a hot topic, and reasonably so. I haven't had my distro of linux long (I experimented with several over the summer, then fell back into an Xp groove) and I'm really frustrated by the fact that I cannont write to my FAT32 drive. I've read one message thread here and a couple elsewhere, and none have offered me a solution to my problem. The problem isn't that I can't write to my Fat32 drive (as i misquoted above), it's that I can't do it as anyone accept root. I have no clue how to solve this problem, I'm hoping some one can help, or direct me to somewhere that has an answer.

Secondly, Grub fails to boot Windows Xp for me when I want to. I have two harddrives: one for Xp, and then one for various files and Linux, with them being the master and slave drives respectively. So in my bios I have my computer set to boot my slave/linux drive first, and it loads grub fine. When I want to load windows however, I have to go into my bios and set my master drive to boot up first. Is there some reason why Grub won't let me boot my master drive without having to change my bios setup? It's as if it's telling me XP is horrid, and that I should only use linux.

for second question, try putting this in your grub.conf(while bios is set to boot from second drive):

title WinXP
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
chainloader +1

For first q, add options in the /etc/fstab file for your FAT32 drive's line. If your line looked like this:
#<-this is for comments
#device mnt-point fs-type options dump pass
/dev/hdb1 /mnt/win vfat defaults 0 0
Change it to this:
/dev/hdb1 /mnt/win vfat auto,umask=0,uid=jankerz,gid=users 0 0
The 'umask=0' option sets liberal permissions on the FAT32, letting anyone to anything with it. 'uid=' makes 'jankerz' own the files on the FAT32, 'gid=' makes it also belong to the 'users' group. 'auto' mounts automatically on startup.

gracious...