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Permissions and partitions

I just created a FAT32 partition in Windows, copied the contents of /home into it as root, and added the line

/dev/hda2 /home vfat user 0 0

into /etc/fstab. When I log in as root (or in Windows), I can read and modify the data just fine, but when I try to log into xfce as a regular user, it says 'Error: unable to open /home/morgan/.xfce4: permission denied.' Since FAT doesn't have file permissions and I set the user option, how can I let regular users read and write the contents?

Any suggestions are appreciated.

You mount a vfat partition as your home directory? An interesting arrangement -- not the most secure one, but interesting nevertheless. Try this fstab line:

/dev/hda2 /home vfat user,quiet,umask=0 0 0

you usually want to mount foreign partitions in a mount directory. mounting an external device to your home partition is bound to lead to problems because there are a lot of hidden settings there that get masked when you do something like that.

Code:

su -c "mkdir -p /mnt/windows"

the add a line to fstab

/dev/hda2 /mnt/windows vfat rw,user,umask=0222 0 0

whenever you want to access your windows files, do

Code:

mount /mnt/windows

as a regular user. leave managing the home directory up to GNU/Linux.

you can even put a link to your windows files in your home directory

Code:

ln -s /home/<username>/windows /mnt/windows