mounting ntfs for users on laptop

Work this out!

I have had an ongoing issue with my ntfs partition on my laptop: users cannot read it.
my line in fstab is (or was):

/dev/hda2 /mnt/xp ntfs noauto,user,nosuid,ro,umask=777 1 0

I could never get it to mount and be readable by the user. I've just been fiddling around and found that if I look at the permissions of /mnt/xp when it is mounted it's 144

I then changed the "umask=#" part to "umask=555". The mounted permissions then changed to 504!

So, using bad logic I tried "umask=144". The permissions of /mnt/xp when mounted is now 555.

Put that in yer pipe and smoke it!

Try umask=000 that allways works for me on fat 32, not tried ntfs tho

ah, im thinking the wrong way round! A umask is like a netmask no? 255.255.255.0 allows any connection to the last 256 addresses, so umask=144 changes the unset bits in the permissions! I think I understand now.

I think with anything but a linux partition you need 000 as the other f/s do not support permission bits

/dev/hdc1 /mnt/windows ntfs noauto,ro,user,umask=0222 0 0

hdc1 is the ntfs partition where Windows XP resides on my Dell 5150 laptop. Don't ask me why Dell uses hdc for the hard drive instead of hda.

/mnt/windows is the folder that the windows partition is mounted to.

ntfs is the filesystem.

noauto,ro,user,umask=0222 are the mount options. I don't automount the partition, but have in the past, and it will work without problem. ro is read only, I don't want to write to the partition. user allows users to mount, so that you don't have to be root to mount. umask=0222 makes files copied from the ntfs partition have permissions rw-r--r--. 0 0 means the filesystem will not be dumped, nor checked at boot.

Thanks for the feedback, all working now.