Problems mounting usb external hard drive...

Linux~Powered · 06-05-2008, 03:14 AM

I'm having an issue while trying to mount my external hard drive. I keep getting the error "only root can mount /dev/sdb1 on /mnt/external" when I try to mount as a user.

This is my fstab...

Code:

/dev/sdb1 /mnt/external ext3 noauto,owner,group,rw  1   2

/dev/sdb1

Code:

brw-r----- 1 root disk 8, 17 2008-06-04 02:11 /dev/sdb1

/mnt/external

Code:

drwxrwxr-x 2 root cdrom 4096 2002-03-16 01:34 external

I also added GROUP="cdrom" to my /etc/udev/rules.d/50-udev-default.rules

Is there something I'm missing or doing wrong?

tramni1980 · 06-05-2008, 03:19 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Linux~Powered

This is my fstab...

Code:

/dev/sdb1 /mnt/external ext3 noauto,owner,group,rw  1   2

/dev/sdb1

Code:

brw-r----- 1 root disk 8, 17 2008-06-04 02:11 /dev/sdb1

/mnt/external

Change "owner" to "user" and everything should be ok. See man mount and man fstab.

Linux~Powered · 06-05-2008, 03:22 AM

That worked.. thanks. I thought if I added a group that I'm in to the fstab that it would have worked.

shadowsnipes · 06-05-2008, 10:55 AM

I think you would be interested in pmount.

Quote:

Originally Posted by SlackBuild README

pmount is a wrapper around the standard mount program which permits
normal users to mount removable devices without a matching
/etc/fstab entry.

The program also includes "pmount-hal" which reads information from
hal (device labels, mount options) and passes them to pmount.

Putting entries in /etc/fstab is fine and dandy, but you will see the limitations of doing so for removable devices the first time you pop in a device that uses a different file system or has multiple partitions (with varying file systems) that you need to access. Do note that you can also use pmount with non-removable devices if you whitelist them in /etc/pmount.allow.