i have a few questions about my external hard drive (maxtor 5000 LE):

1. how can i get linux to automount it on booting? will it complicate the issue if i'm not always hooked up to it? (it's a laptop, so i don't always use it at home)

2. sometimes the first time i try to write a file to it it gives me an error that "writing to devices is not supported." what does this mean, and how can i get rid of it? i just tried to write something to it, and it wouldn't let me, and then i tried again, and it did it no problem.

3. i've had it mouting at /mnt/removable, but i would prefer to have my flash drive that i use occasionally mount there. if i change the mount point now, will that mess anything up?

thanks a lot for any help.

oh, i'm running mandrake 9.1

Woo, this is 3 times I get to reference this link, that I've not even used myself, but maybe I'll buy one for the fun of it, see if this link will help/answer/guide you on your way:
http://ldots.org/prodrive/

hmmm....

thanks for the reference. unfortunately, that doesn't really help me a lot. i have no problems mounting the drive (in mandrake it's all point-and-click stuff). however, i'm having a lot of problems writing to the drive. i can't seem to give myself write permissions. the only way i've been able to do it was to log in as root, enable write permissions for everyone, then log out and log back in as my usual user. however, i really don't want to have to do that every time. any suggestions on how to avoid this? thanks a lot.

I t seems that I am having a similar issue. When I boot my laptop (running RH 9.0) the drive mounts fine per this line in my /etc/fstab

/dev/sda1 /mnt/fire0 auto auto,user,rw 0 0

I can rwx all day long as root, but only rx as another user

The permissions on the mount look like this:

drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 32768 Dec 31 1969 fire0

I have tried issuing chmod 777 /mnt/fire0 and ge the following error:

Operation not permitted.


Help!