Ok, following my trend of having seemingly unsolvable problems in Linux....

This time, I'm trying to write to a mounted storage partition in Mepis. I can't write to it mounted as a user. If I mount it when I'm root, I can write to it. I can't write to it when mounted as a user. I've tried just about every combination of fstab lines I can think of, including:

/dev/sda4 /mnt/sda4 ext3 user,exec,rw 0 0
/dev/sda4 /mnt/sda4 ext3 noauto,users,exec,rw 0 0
/dev/sda4 /mnt/sda4 ext3 noauto,user,exec 0 0

attempting to add "umask=000" (or any umask) produces an error. This is annoying. This will be the third forum I'v tried, I hope someone can shed some light!

Thanks,

Kal

The ext3 filesystem has user and group permissions. To obtain permissions to write to it use "chmod" or "chown" as root. For example,if your user name is kalnaren, then you can gain exclusive access with the commands:
sudo chown -R kalnaren /mnt/sda4
sudo chmod 0700 kalnaren /mnt/sda4

Already tried it. No effect.

Please post the output of "ls -ld /mnt/*". Is this an internal drive or an external one. Normally you need to mount a partition as root. For ext3, the ownership and permissions of the mount point directory will change to reflect owner, group and permissions of the root filesystem. Are you sure that you used chmod and chown after the device was mounted?

If this is an internal drive, then add it to /etc/fstab so that it is mounted as root. If this is an external drive, then use the "user" and "noauto" options in the /etc/fstab entry. That will allow you to mount it as a regular user. ( Note: for a usb drive, you may be using the udev/hal automount facility instead. That would be ok too. )