After messing around with help files and commands and after trying to cd to /mnt/win_d to access my windows partition via the command prompt and getting permission denied. I came to the conclusion that something is definately wrong. ls -l in the mount folder shows me that it gives the group and other users read access. So I su into root and do chmod 775 /dev/hda5/ where hda5 is the device for the windows partition I'm trying to access. After doing this and doing ls -l again in the /mnt folder I find that it didn't change these permissions. Hrm... am I doing something wrong? Am I forgetting to do something? Or perhaps these changes aren't immediate unless I perform anotehr command afterwards? Even so, why am I getting permission denied EVEN THOUGH all users should have read access, at least?!

Have you modified your fstab file in /etc?

I didn't know I would need to. Does fstab overwrite anything you do with chmod?!?

No, fstab allows you to set the permissions on mounting. i.e., if you want users to be able to mount the CDROM drive, you have to specifically allow that in /etc/fstab.
man fstab
man mount

Yeah I did man fstab and man mount, while man fstab made sense and I sorta understand it now. man mount had too many senetnces that ran on and on and turned into paragraphed sized sentences and had comma's thrown about it. It would of made alot more sense if whoever wrote that had taken a breath and broke his thought down into sentences. So now I"m still sitting here not able to get my user to be able to use my windows partitions. Could someone give me an example of how an fstab entry allowing users to be able to access them looks? I'm using mandrake 9.1 if it makes a difference. I know sometimes different distros do different things.

less /etc/fstab

and drop the results here. then we can see if it is set up correctly. doing a chmod the the file of /etc/fstab won't do anything for you.

cheers.

Here's how my entry looks:

/dev/hda1 /mnt/win98 vfat uid=500,gid=500,rw,auto 0 0