I dual boot with Zenwalk 5.2 and Slackware 12.2. Both of their fstab files are identical, except that Zenwalk sees the partitions as sd and Slack as hd.

Anyway...I have two partitions on a 40g hd which I only mount manually. In Zenwalk, I have no problems with these drives, they mount fine, and I can move to the directories and view the files that exist with no problems, however, in Slackware, no matter how often I chmod the drives, after I umount them then I have to re-chmod them again when I re-mount them, every single file, every single dir.

Neither Zenwalk nor Slackware have these partitions in their fstab files, so what other configuration files, etc should I look at as to what is causing this?

Thanks.

What filesystems are on the partitions? If it's ext* or some other unix/linux filesystem, the permissions should be preserved when you unmount. But if it's NTFS or FAT, the permissions and ownership are set by options to mount. Only thing is, if that were the problem, I wouldn't expect chmod to help, but it's the only thing that comes to mind.

You can forget distro specific config files by adding the correct permissions to your fstab. Unless you want different permissions for different files, which only is possible if the partition type is a linux/unix one (as said by openSauce) and users IDs and logins on the systems which will mount the partition are equal (/etc/passwd and /etc/group).

Thanks...However, that didn't help...

<Edit> Not important since I stated it below briefly, but the partitions are ntfs. However, with this issue I guess it's unimportant for the problem still persists
</edit>

Unfortunately, I didn't notice that I did have those drives in the Zenwalk fstab, but even editing Slackwares fstab file didn't help either...Using -t ntfs, didn't do anything, also...

Anyway, I think I'll just copy the files I want to keep onto Zenwalk then repartition the drive into ext2. I've been meaning to do so, but there are a lot of files on those drives and I'm just playing it lazy......

Just out of curiosity, though. Could the kernel be causing this? Slackware uses 2.6.27.7 (partitions read as hd), Zenwalk uses 2.6.25.4 (partitions read as sd).

So the partitions are NTFS?

Try
See NTFS options in man mount. ### is your numeric user/group id.

I've seen so many questions about this lately, there needs to be a sticky..

And adding uid, gid, umask, dmask and fmask (man mount) options to both fstab's didn't help?
It will always mount your partition with the user id owner specified in each system. That should work. And also should work using ntfs-3g instead of ntfs.

Thanks, that did it.

I didn't quite fully understand what you were talking about until openSauce wrote this

I'm still too much of a noob, and there are thousands of things to read, let alone knowing the correct terminology to even search for...

But either way, it still is strange that Zenwalk doesn't have anything like that in it's fstab and works just fine...

This is what it looks like in my zenwalk fstab...
And my Slackware now looks like this...
Again, thanks...

Yeah, it's a bit of a learning curve! But don't worry, we've all been there. The difference between slack and zen is probably in the default umask - you should find the command umask gives different outputs on each one.

In case you hadn't worked it out, the {f,d,u}mask values are like inverted chmod permissions - 000 gives rwxrwxrwx permissions to your directories, and 111 gives rw-rw-rw- to the regular files.