Hi all

I've tried very hard to find an answer to this, both in the linuxquestions archives and on the web in general. Unfortunately, I've failed so far.

There seem to be lots of posts from people who want to mount their windows partitions who have run into a similar problem: only root has rw access to the partition. It seems that for vfat there are a bunch of relevant options like 'umask=xxx' and 'uid=xxx' which get the job done. These are not valid options for ext3, however (as I'm sure you all know). Options like 'users,rw' are accepted, and allow me to mount/unmount, but I still don't get rw access for users. My own user name is 'iu'. I've made iu the owner of both the partition I'm mounting to *and* the device itself (i.e. /dev/hdd1). This makes no difference.

Given that the directory I'm mounting to is /mnt/montague and the partition I'm mounting is /dev/hdd1, what line do I want in fstab so that any user can both mount and read & write to the partition (or, perhaps better, only 'iu' (500))? Also, if I need to change the attributes of the device and/or folder, what changes must I make?

With genuine thanks

Ian

So what are the permissions of the mount point i.e. /mnt/montague?

Post output of:
ls -l /mnt/

[iu@localhost iu]$ ls -l /mnt/
total 32
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 16 14:55 cdrom
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 16 14:55 cdrom1
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 21 17:36 data
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 16 14:55 floppy
drwxr-xr-x 2 iu iu 4096 Nov 21 17:55 montague
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 18 18:25 ramdrive
drwxr-xr-x 2 iu iu 4096 Nov 21 17:55 russell
drwxr-xr-x 2 iu iu 4096 Nov 21 17:55 tarski

Note that I have two other hdd partitions that I didn't mention that I want to mount to /mnt/tarski and /mnt/russell.

When mounted, the owner and group for each of the iu-owned partitions changes to root. I can mount/unmount any of these partitions from the desktop, but not with normal user permissions from the shell. My fstab file is currently as follows.

[iu@localhost iu]$ cat /etc/fstab
LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hda3 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/cdrom1 /mnt/cdrom1 udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0
/dev/hdd1 /mnt/montague ext3 users,rw 0 0
/dev/hdd2 /mnt/tarski ext3 users,rw 0 0
/dev/hdd3 /mnt/russell ext3 users,rw 0 0

Change the fstab to
/dev/hdd1 /mnt/montague ext3 defaults 1 2

You can use the chmod command to allow others to read / write. If you want to mount / unmount then add the user option.

Thanks

What's the significance/role of the two digits?

Ian

See man pages for fstab. The last digit is the priority of fsck to autocheck the filesystem at bootup.