Hey, recently I have kinda rearranged my hard drive with some paritions. I am using Linux to do some Computer Science homework for college. I have a windows partition (NTFS), a linux partition (ext2) to keep all of my system stuff on (I'm using Knoppix 3.7), and another partition to trade files between the 2 partitions (FAT32, and rightly named Purgatory :-P). For some reason, windows can write to Purgatory, but linux cannot. What's the deal with that? By the way, I'm pretty much a complete newbie when it comes to linux.

Can you see "purgatory" from your file managers in Linux???

Linux is all about permissions.
This can be handy, or it can be a real pain, especially on a single user system.

I'm going to assume that you are mounting the partition 'Pugatory' (nice) from the boot up in your fstab. Let me ask, can you write to the vfat partition as root? If so, then this is a permission problem simmilar to the one I grappled with. A print-out of your fstab would be nice to look in greater depth at your problem.

If your looking to start trying stuff, this is the line to mount my vfat partition from my fstab:

/dev/hdb3 /DATA vfat users,owner,rw,umask=000 0 0

The /dev/hdb3 means primary slave hard drive, partiton number 3. The /DATA is my mount point. vfat is the filesystem. The rest (with the exception of the last 0-space-0) are the permissions to give all users read/write access.

Hope this helps ya out.

Well.... umm... Let's start out with some answers. Yes I can see the hda3 (purgatory, glad ya caught on ) partition in the file manager, and I can look around in it. When I start Knoppix, all I do at the boot command is

boot: knoppix home=/dev/sda1

This is because I messed around with my flash drive being my persistent home directory before I decided to partition my hard drive (I now want, and have, my home to be on hda2, the ext2 partition). I just noticed that I can't write to my ext2 partition either . That does not seem right at all. Thanks for the help... I'm really new at this stuff.

Edit:
Well, I've kinda figured some stuff out. I now have my ext2 partition as my home, and I can write to it now. I've also tried some other things. I can write to the partition with root. If I mount using the desktop (presumably the normal terminal as opposed to root), I cannot write to the partition.

Also, here is my original fstab:

/proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/sys /sys sysfs noauto 0 0
/dev/pts /dev/pts devpts mode=0622 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/auto/floppy auto user,noauto,exec,umask=000 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/auto/cdrom auto user,noauto,exec,ro 0 0
/dev/cdrom1 /mnt/auto/cdrom1 auto users,noauto,exec,ro 0 0
# Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1 ntfs noauto,users,exec,ro,umask=000,uid=knoppix,gid=knoppix 0 0
# Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/hda2 /mnt/hda2 ext2 noauto,users,exec 0 0
# Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/hda5 /mnt/hda5 vfat noauto,users,exec,umask=000,uid=knoppix,gid=knoppix 0 0

Sorry but you lost me.

What exactly can and can't you write to now?

Do you still use /dev/sda1 (this is a flash drive, right?) and is that command still required for you to boot?

Also please post your new fstab.

Sorry about answering a question with more questions.

Yeah, sorry bout the confusion. I have my peristent home set on hda2 (ext2 partition). Modified fstab (where I took your advice): I can write to FAT32 partition with root, but not with the graphical file manager (i.e. desktop / windows, and I'm assuming KDE, but since I'm a linux newbie... I'm not completely sure what that means). I do not use my flash drive anymore. My new fstab, as I said before, is exactly the same, but instead of :
/dev/hda5 /mnt/hda5 vfat noauto,users,exec,umask=000,uid=knoppix,gid=knoppix 0 0

I have:

/dev/hda5 /mnt/hda5 vfat users,owner,rw,umask=000 0 0

Hope this clears some stuff up.

So I am correct in thinking that you can still write to it in Windows (Microsoft) and in Linux as root, regardless of wether you are in a terminal, virtual desktop (think thats what its called, it is like a full screen terminal), or the GUI (your KDE desktop window manager), and that your only problem is when you are logged in as a user, right?

OK, I'd have bet good money that the fstab umask option would have cleared your problems right up. This will require a little research. In the meantime, check the permissions on the /mnt/hda5 subdirectory. This is done by the command 'ls -l /mnt/' (at least I think that will work) and read the right most column of the corresponding line for hda5. This could be the problem.