I am using Mandriva 2007. I have 2 HD with multiple partitions. I am also using a usb external drive. On the external drive and the fat drive only root has the read permission others are forbidden. On the other drives root has rw and others have r permissions. I want to change this so that a normal user has rw permission to these drives and the external drive.

thanks for your help.

# This file is edited by fstab-sync - see 'man fstab-sync' for details
/dev/hdb5 / ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom auto umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850,noauto,ro,exec,users 0 0
/dev/hdd /mnt/cdrom2 auto umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850,noauto,ro,exec,users 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/win_c ntfs umask=0,nls=iso8859-15,ro 0 0
/dev/hdb2 /mnt/win_d ntfs umask=0,nls=iso8859-15,ro 0 0
/dev/hdb3 /mnt/win_e ntfs umask=0,nls=iso8859-15,ro 0 0
/dev/hdb4 /mnt/win_f vfat umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hdb6 swap swap defaults 0 0

The FAT and NTFS filesystems don't support Unix-style permissions (DOS had no conception of file permissions and NTFS uses a different scheme used by Windows NT based systems). Therefore, Linux kludges the file permissions on these f ile systems, assigning files a fixed UID, GID, and permissions. This can be changed at filesystem mount time by adding the uid, gid, and umask in the options in fstab. See "man mount" for more information.