i've just installed the HDD from my old PC into my Linux machine, with the idea of using it for backing up. The drive is detected as /dev/hdd, and I have managed to re-partition and format it (msdos file system). I would appreciate it if someone could help with a couple of difficulties, please:

1) I would like it to mount on startup, and I understand that this is done in /etc/fstab (in SuSE 9.1). I've tried editing this file, but I'm not sure I've done it correctly, as I don't understand what I should put in the fourth column in the listing below (I put users, thinking it may have something to do in part with who/which groups have access to it):

/dev/hdc2 / reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 1
/dev/hdc1 swap swap pri=42 0 0
/dev/hdd /media/hdd msdos users 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
usbf /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs noauto 0 0
/dev/sda4 /media/zip auto noauto,user 0 0
/dev/cdrom /media/cdrom subfs fs=cdfss,ro,procuid,nosuidnodev,exec,
iocharset=utf8 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy subfs fs=floppyfss,procuid,nodev,nosuid,sync 0 0
Sorry the columns aren't very clear. The board is ignoring the extra spaces I inserted

2) Linux won't allow me to give group and others write permissions for the mounted drive. ls -l gives the following line for the directory I mounted it in:

drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 16384 Jan 1 1970 hdd
^^^^^^^ these are the permissions I'm trying to change
The listing for /dev/hdd is:

brw-rw---- 1 root disk 22, 64 Apr 6 2004 hdd

The system appears to have set a ceiling on the permissions, as I can (as root) remove permissions but I cannot add write permission for group and others. The other mounts in /media/ (CD ROM, floppy and the writable partition of the Zip-drive) all have full permissions.

Is the bizarre date shown above (Jan 1 1970) anything to do with the problem? The system date is correct on my PC, and while the PC the drive came from is fairly old, it certainly isn't that old!

Thanks,

Rob

users,umask=0000
for a certain group to only access the drive
umask=0007,gid=xxx
where xxx is the group id from /etc/group

Thanks! I added umask=0000 to the line in fstab, and I now have full access to the disk.

Rob

i'm having the same problem as had, where exactly did you add umask=0000?
this is what my fstab looks like....

/dev/hda3 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hda4 / reiserfs defaults 1 1
/dev/hda2 /WinD vfat defaults 1 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,owner,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0


i'm running slackware 10. on my gentoo box i added my normal user to the 'wheel' group and that sorted the problem out, but doesn't seem to do anything on slackware.

any ideas??