I have just had to reload mandrake doing an update, and cannot now write to my Windows directory. Is this an error in my fstab or some other cause.

it is most likely becuase your windows drive is not getting mounted.
therefore it is probably a problem with your fstab.

if you have the proper entry in your fstab and you have automount installed, then your windows drive will be mounted at boot-time.

is your windows filesystem fat32 or ntfs?

do this as root:
mkdir /mnt/c

if you have a fat32 fs do this:
mount -t vfat /dev/hd?? /mnt/c

if it is ntfs do this:
mount -t ntfs /dev/hd?? /mnt/c

where ?? is the drive and partition of your drive
ie hda1, hdb1, etc...

look at man fstab to find out how to set up your fstab

thanks for the info skel.
I was wondering how to mount my windows partition.
But could you tell me how to change my permissions so that all I can access it without being root.

Thanks

I found after all that the solution was quite simple. By changing 'default' to 'user, exec' in my fstab windows drive line I solved the problem