I recently performed a clean install of FC5 on my machine (dual boot with Windows XP, Windows on one drive and Fedora on a separate drive), and all is smooth and slick except for one thing - I have an external USB drive (/dev/sda1) that auto-mounts, but as root:root and with root-only read-only permissions, so when I'm logged into the machine as a regular user, I can see the drive, but not its contents. The drive is NTFS, and I do have kernel-module-ntfs installed, and can see the Windows drive as a user through proper /etc/fstab configuration.

To provide further clue, my USB thumb drive functions normally - of course, it's using FAT, rather than NTFS.

I've tried resetting permissions/ownership on the NTFS external as root, but if I power-cycle it, or reboot the machine, it remounts as root:root 200.

Is there a way to configure FC5 to allow the drive to automount with all user read-access?

Thanks for your help, and let me know if more details will be helpful.

Rob

You need to add the umask='xxx' to the options list in fstab. e.g.

/dev/sda1 /mnt/usbdrive ntfs defaults, umask=222 0 0

which sets the directory mode of the drive to 555 (r-xr-xr-x) and files 444 (r--r--r--).

This is apt as it's best to mount an nt filesystem as read-only.

The drive doesn't show up in /etc/fstab as /dev/sda1, but it does appear as /dev/sda1 when I issue a 'df -h'.

Adding '/dev/sda1 /media/Backup ntfs defaults, umask=0222 0 0' to /etc/fstab doesn't do the trick, likely because the drive is automatically re-setup each time, being hotpluggable.

I do have /dev/hda1 set up the way you mention above, for the /mnt/windows partition, and it works, but that is a static, internal drive.

In FC4, this automagical control was done via fstab-sync, but the release notes for FC5 mention that it's done by a different mechanism in the new release.

I'm fine with mounting as read-only if the drive is NTFS - I'd just like regular users to be able to read/execute from it, as well as root.

Why?. What was the.Can you Believe? Can this be true I don't get it.
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7.7. No automatic fstab editing for removable media

The fstab-sync facility has been removed. In Fedora Core , the fstab-sync program is removed in favor of desktop specific solutions for mounting removable media. Entries for hotplug devices or inserted media are no longer automatically added to the /etc/fstab file. Command-line users may migrate to gnome-mount, which provides similar functionality.


file:///usr/share/doc/HTML/index.html#id311421

Cuh-uriously enough, I set SELinux to permissive, rebooted, couldn't mount as even root, so I turned SELinux off, rebooted again, and voila, it works exactly the way I wanted it to.

Call it solved

I have the exact same set-up and problem as Skarekroh, but turning SELinux off and rebooting doesn't do anything. I may have not turned off SELinux correctly (I went to /etc/sysconfig/selinux and set SELINUX to "disabled"). Otherwise, I have no idea why it's not working. I'm also not crazy about disabling security in order to plug in a removable drive. Any light that can be shed on this? Thanks!

Greg

As a bump to bring this back to light, after a yum upgrade of the kernel to the latest released, the drive reverted to not readable by the user, owned by root:root with read/execute but not write permissions for root (ntfs, so that's fine). Now, like Alarmo, shifting to Permissive SELinux, then Disabled SELinux is not doing the trick.

Ideas?

This is an old thread but I had an issue with the umask and a removable NTFS partition on USB with NTFS-3g (FC6) - it would always mount with a 222 umask and I could not write or modify files in Gnome. After spending time reading about all the other people with this problem and not finding a solution I came across the gnome-mount utility. You can set the mount options for removable media this way.

gnome-mount --verbose -p mountpoint -o umask=000 --write-settings

and to display settings

gnome-mount --verbose -p mountpoint --display-settings

you can also use -d /dev/device after you plug it in - the same goes for the mount point I was not able to get it to modify the mount options with the drive unplugged and using -h.

BTW, lshal tell you a bit about the mounted volumes(and other devices).