My fstab has a line that was generated by the Slackware install to include /dev/hda4 on /transfer. It works, but the end of the line reads "defaults 1 0" and I want the partition to be writable. It is a FAT partition, used for files that need to be accessible from both my XP installation and my SLackware installation. What do I need to change to make this happen? If I change "defaults" to "rw" it doesn't complain at boot, but is still not writable. Could it be a permissions issue? How do you check permissions of such a thing?

Have you tried writing to it as root? FAT partitions don't have permissions (MS-DOS had no concept of such a thing) and so you need to use the user, group, and umask mount options to determine permissions on FAT partitions.

Umm, root can write to it. I want any user to be able to. Won't the umask option limit who can use it?

If you set a umask of 000 then all the files will be world readable/writeable. If you need more than that, use the uid and gid options (sorry, not user and group, I was half asleep when I wrote that ). The uid and gid options specify what user and group ownership all of the files have. For example, if your uid id 1000 and your gid is 100, using the uid=1000,gid=100 options will make all the files on the filesystem owned by your user. See man mount for more information.

to be able to write to fat partition u have to pass the permission from fstab, here is a copy of my fstab.

none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hda1 /win/c vfat rw,exec,noatime,uid=500,,gid=500,user 0 0
/dev/hda5 /win/d vfat rw,exec,noatime,uid=500,,gid=500,user 0 0
/dev/hdb9 /win/d_ak vfat rw,exec,noatime,uid=500,,gid=500,user 0 0
/dev/hda6 /win/e vfat rw,exec,noatime,uid=500,,gid=500,user 0 0
/dev/hdb5 /win/e_avk vfat rw,exec,noatime,uid=500,,gid=500,user 0 0
/dev/hda7 /win/f vfat rw,exec,noatime,uid=500,,gid=500,user 0 0
/dev/hdb6 /win/f_avk vfat rw,exec,noatime,uid=500,,gid=500,user 0 0
LABEL=SWAP-hdb8 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hdd /media/cdrom auto pamconsole,exec,noauto,managed 0 0
/dev/hdc /media/cdrecorder auto pamconsole,exec,noauto,managed 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy auto pamconsole,exec,noauto,managed 0 0


please note that in my fstab only one user has the permissions. if u want to give permissions to all, then refer the manual page of mount command and change the options accordingly.

tell me if this solves it.

/dev/hda2 / ext3 rw 0 0
proc /proc proc rw 0 0
/dev/hda1 /ntfs ntfs rw 0 0
/dev/hda4 /transfer vfat rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts rw,gid=5,mode=620 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs rw 0 0


--from mtab.

dev/hda3 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hda2 / ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/hda1 /ntfs ntfs defaults 1 0
/dev/hda4 /transfer vfat rw,user 1 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom auto noauto,user,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,user 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0


--from fstab


Why do users not have permissions to write to /transfer?