Hello forum,

I just thought I'd post to say that you can configure Mandriva 2007 to mount a USB external hard drive with NTFS without having to write a custom FDI rule like you had to do with Mandriva 2006 due to HAL's constant re-writing of the device line in fstab upon reboot. The drive could only be accessed in root after HAL re-wrote the device line. In otherwords, HAL would remove the required entry of umask=0022, making the drive unaccessable for an ordinary user without the custom FDI rule to overide it.

I don't yet know what method is used, but it works great.

Roy

Cool thanks for letting us know. Suse and fedora have similar positives about them.
Just in case, mention how you can configure mandriva to do this.

Hello Xerop,

The way I configured Mandriva 2007 to automount my USB NTFS hard drive is as follows:

First, I noticed the drive was recognized in "Devices" as a USB device but didn't appear to be mounted. So I opened up "Configure your Computer" and clicked on the "Mount Points" tab, then I clicked on "Create, Resize, Delete Hard Disk Partitions" Then I clicked on the tab for my USB NTFS hard drive (mine was sda). Then I clicked on its partition to show the options for that hard drive. Then I clicked on "Toggle to Expert Mode" and then clicked on "Options", and put a check mark where it said "Give write access to ordinary users (umask=0022)". Then I clicked on "Mount" to mount the hard drive, and in the next window that popped up it asked where I wanted it mounted, so I typed "/mnt/USBNTFSHD" but you can name your hard drive anything you want. When I closed everything, I was asked if I want to save the changes to fstab, and I chose "yes". The USB hard drive was then mounted, and the hard drive device line was written in fstab automatically.

The line looked like this:

/dev/sda5 /mnt/USBNTFSHD ntfs unmask=0022 0 0

Just to be on the safe side, I then opened up the icon for the same hard drive in "Devices" again, and right clicked on "properties", and clicked on the "Mounting" tab, and put a check mark where it says "Mount Automatically". This might not be necessary since the other drives did not have the check mark, but I did it anyway. The drive now would automount upon reboot each time. It worked perfectly.

I don't think I left out any steps and I think my memory serves me correctly.

Regards,
Roy