I've tried everything - Can't Change Root Ownership of USB HD

Hello forum,

I've reposted this from the hardware section to the newbee section, I hope nobody minds.

After performing a clean install of Mandriva 2006 on a freshly formated partition, one of my USB hard drives (NTFS) has a padlock on its folder meaning that root is the owner of the drive, so I can't view the contents of this hard drive unless I su it or log in the desktop as root. The other USB hard drive (fat32) has no padlock on its folder so I am able to view its contents with no problem. Both of these USB hard drives are mounted in the mnt directory, along with my other devices.

Everytime I make a change in fstab, such as adding unmask 222, it always reverts back to its original state upon reboot. In other words, any changes I make in fstab will not stick. And I am sure I am saving the changes.

I have tried the chmod command in the terminal window, (su) (chmod +rxw, etc.), I get a message saying it can't change the attributes of the drive because it is a read only file system.

I have also tried to change ownership from root to myself by creating a custom rule in msec for this drive, which is supposed to override the system settings, but it does not remove the padlock from this USB hard drive.

So, that is the problem - the owner of this USB hard drive is root and I can't seem to change the owner to myself. If I could change the owner to myself, I'm sure I could then view the contents of this USB hard drive.

I was able to view the contents of this same USB hard drive in Mandriva 10.1(no padlock on the folder) but not Mandriva 2006.

Is anyone in this forum savvy enough to give me a clue as what to do? I

Any help would be greatly appreciated,

Roy S. Smith

You should add user,rw at the mount options from the usb drive in the /etc/fstab file.

Thanks, Mr_Demilord,

I put that entry in fstab like you said using emacs and saved it, but upon reboot, it was gone.

My fstab file looks like this:

# This file is edited by fstab-sync - see 'man fstab-sync' for details
/dev/hda1 / ext2 defaults 1 1
/dev/hdb5 /home/roy/secondHD ntfs umask=0,nls=iso8859-1,ro 0 0
/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom auto umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,noauto,ro,exec,users 0 0
/dev/hdd /mnt/cdrom2 auto umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,noauto,ro,exec,users 0 0
none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=ext2:vfat,--,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850 0 0
/dev/hda2 /mnt/win_c ntfs umask=0,nls=iso8859-1,ro 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/sdd5 /mnt/USB_HD_80 vfat pamconsole,exec,noauto,codepage=850,iocharset=iso8859-1,managed 0 0
/dev/sdc5 /mnt/USB_HD_250 ntfs pamconsole,exec,noauto,utf8,iocharset=iso8859-1,managed 0 0
/dev/sda1 /mnt/LEXAR_MEDIA vfat pamconsole,exec,noauto,noatime,codepage=850,iocharset=iso8859-1,managed 0 0

Mtab looks like this:

/dev/hda1 / ext2 rw 0 0
none /proc proc rw 0 0
none /proc/bus/usb usbfs rw 0 0
none /sys sysfs rw 0 0
/dev/hdb5 /home/roy/secondHD ntfs ro,umask=0,nls=iso8859-1 0 0
none /mnt/floppy supermount rw,sync,dev=/dev/fd0,fs=ext2:vfat,-- 0 0
/dev/hda2 /mnt/win_c ntfs ro,umask=0,nls=iso8859-1 0 0
/dev/sda1 /mnt/LEXAR_MEDIA vfat rw,nosuid,nodev,noatime,codepage=850,iocharset=iso8859-1,user=roy 0 0
/dev/sdc5 /mnt/USB_HD_250 ntfs rw,nosuid,nodev,utf8,iocharset=iso8859-1,user=roy 0 0
/dev/sdd5 /mnt/USB_HD_80 vfat rw,nosuid,nodev,codepage=850,iocharset=iso8859-1,user=roy 0 0


The problem drive is in the next to the last line, /dev/sdc5. The mtab file has me as the owner, not root, but in the properties / permissions of the device, it shows root as being the owner.

Can anybody offer a solution?

Thanks much in advance,
Roy S. Smith

From the comment at the top of your fstab file, it looks like it's being generated by some program, maybe one that runs during init? Open a terminal and try "man fstab-sync".

Try asking this in the mandriva forum. I've never had this happen to me in mandriva, but then again, I've never had an NTFS usb drive...

Please post follow ups here:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=385098