troubles with fstab after partitioning

hello all,

i just recently partitioned my external hdd, as i'm going to use one partition for backing up and only mount it when doing backups. however, i've had a lot of problems since making the partitions, and i'm not exactly sure what to do. currently, i am not allowed to write to the first partition. when i try it says "access denied." i tried to change this with the chmod command. i did the following two commands:

chmod 664 /dev/sda1
chmod 664 /mnt/maxtor (the mount point for sda1)

but i still can't write to /mnt/maxtor. anyway, i figure maybe the problem is in my fstab. here is what my fstab used to say about this drive before the partition:

/dev/sda1 /mnt/maxtor auto user,iocharset=utf8,kudzu,auto,umask=0,exec 0 0

here is what it says now, after the partition:

/dev/sda5 /mnt/backup vfat umask=0 0 0
/dev/sda1 /mnt/maxtor vfat defaults 0 0

what kind of changes should i make? i would like /dev/sda1 to be mounted automatically upon booting up, and for everyone to have read, write, and execute permissions. i would like everyone to have read, write, and execute permissions for /dev/sda5, but only root should be allowed to mount it, and it should not be mounted on bootup. any help greatly appreciated.

For sda5, put "owner,noauto" next to the "umask=0" option. Owner means only root can mount.
For sda1 put "umask=0" for everyone to have rwx permissions. The "defaults" option should make it mount automatically on startup, if it doesn't, add an "auto" option.

aaa,

thanks a lot! just a quick question on syntax. does that mean there should be a total of three zeros in the sda1 line? i'm not sure what the two zeros at the end do. here's how i have it now:

/dev/sda1 /mnt/maxtor vfat defaults,umask=0 0 0

thanks again.

hmm....

well, i made the suggested changes, and now i'm having different problems. i just rebooted the system, and then i opened up /mnt/maxtor (my mount point for /dev/sda1). it displayed all sorts of folders and files with random characters for names (probably because i reformatted--or tried, at least, the disk without bothering to delete everything). i tried to delete a directory, and i was told that it didn't exist. then, i tried to copy something to the drive, and was told that it could not create the directory. any ideas on what this could be? i'm really hoping that i didn't hose the drive--when i tried to reformat it in diskdrake it froze right away. but, it should be formatted as vfat anyway, which is what i was trying to reformat it as.

umask=0 sets the default permission to rwxrwxrwx.
The first "0" is for whether the filesystem should be dumped (backed up). You put "1" there if you want that. The second is for scanning on startup. "0" means no scan, "1" means scan this first (should be the "/" drive), "2" means scan these second.
<edit>You need to use umask to set permissions because the windows filesystems don't support them.</edit>

well, i was having trouble formatting /dev/sda1 to fat32, so i gave up and formatted it as reiser fs (i don't use my xp partition that much anyway, so why not?)

anyway, now i'm having the exact same problems with the drive.

i can't write to /mnt/maxtor (still mount point for /dev/sda1). what should i do to my fstab now? here's the relevant part of my fstab. my whole fstab is also posted in the reply just below this one:

/dev/sda1 /mnt/maxtor reiserfs notail,noatime 1 2

thanks again for any help.

i'm also having problems all of a sudden with my cdrom drive. after installation of mandrake 9.1, my cdrom drive was working fine, and every time on bootup an icon showed on my desktop for the cdrom drive, mounted at /mnt/cdrom. after running k3b setup for the first time, it made changes to my fstab so that i could use the cd burning capabilities of the drive. however, this didn't change the original settings of the drive, and everything still worked as it originally had, with the cdrom being mounted on bootup at /mnt/cdrom.

well, since my difficulties with the partitioning, the line for this in the fstab got deleted, and i'm not sure how to put it back in (no, unfortunately, i didn't save my fstab first ). below is my whole fstab for reference. thanks to all who can help!

/dev/hda5 / ext3 noatime 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
/dev/hda7 /home ext3 noatime 1 2
/dev/sda5 /mnt/backup vfat owner,noauto,umask=0 0 0
/dev/scd0 /mnt/cdrecorder auto user,noauto,ro,exec 0 0
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/cruzer auto user,iocharset=utf8,kudzu,noauto,umask=0,exec 0 0
none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=auto,--,iocharset=utf8,sync,umask=0 0 0
/dev/sda1 /mnt/maxtor reiserfs notail,noatime 1 2
/dev/sdc1 /mnt/removable auto user,iocharset=utf8,kudzu,noauto,umask=0,exec 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat iocharset=utf8,umask=0 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda6 swap swap defaults 0 0