K, I have had enough of this sh*t. I have been trying to fix it for 2 years and it still is a pain. Its just too much head ache. here is the problem. I have a 40 gig USB 2.0 hardisk which i store all my files on in Windows XP and only use the drive as READ ONLY in linux. I have no need to ever write on the disk using linux. the thing is the drive is mounted automatically when I plug it in, suposedly using submount. the intention of this is to make life easier for users but it doesn't. everytime the drive is being mounted as WR NTFS which is not safe and not required at all. and i end up with not being able to acces the drive unless im root. I read infinite amount of documentation which lead me to having to put an entry in the /etc/fstab which have specific mounting options for the drive, ro. yet everytime the drive continues to be mounted as RW. somehow the submount is overriding the entry in the fstab and mounting it with crappy mount options. I looked everywhere to find the config file for submount and its nowhere to be found. again Suse guys had desided to become smart asses.

Tryed removing submount all together and ended up crashing everything becuase it also mounts system partitions at startup.

any ideas would be very appreciated.

Does this help?


I use the following to mount my NTFS partition (READ ONLY)

I couldn't even get access to my USB 2 drive under Suse 9.3 unless I was root. It was pretty silly. However I just updated to Suse 10 and I now have easy access to my USB drive (NTFS) as a regular user. It works fine. They must have fixed something in 10. I'm not sure if this will help you, but my external drive problem was solved with an upgrade to Suse 10.

Yes. Actually SuSE 10 has a lot of improvements over 9.3.

well yeah, thats exactly my problem. I can't access the usb drive as a regular user becuase suse is mounting it as W/R. thing is I want to get to the bottom of every mounting problem out there hence " submount and subfs". I want to find out how they work and their configuration and every possible mount option out there so i can fix the mounting problems once and for all.

any info on the submount / subfs system would be greatly appretiated.


ps. i tryed updating suse before and ended up distroying the intire system. I dont trust the patching process that suse is following but i'm going to search and see if i find anything relating to subfs

it doesnt matter what i do, becuase at the end subfs is going to override the entry in fstab and make its own mount options , so the only thing i can do is find the configuration for subfs and give it my own options.