Using Windows partition in Linux
 

I am trying to let all users access my windows partition from Linux, but it is owned by root and the permissions are 500. I can't change the permissions, because I get a read only error. I modified the line in fstab slightly so that it looks like this:

/dev/hda1 /win-c ntfs rw,user 0 0

How can I change the permissions to let everyone read the partition?

Add 'umask=000' in the line in fstab. Everybody will have full access.
However, it's ntfs so I don't think you can write to it.
Change 'rw' to 'ro' and umask=222 (I think this is correct?) to mount it read-only for everyone.

Anotherr nice little trick is to shrink your ntfs partition a little and make a FAT32 partition so Linux can write to it. That way you can have two way comm between your windows and Linux boxes.

I have read that the latest 2.6 kernels are getting pretty good at write support. That is NOT from personal experience though. I would be very very careful.

To be safe, use ratcheson's advice. That is what I tell people to. It is much safer.

Later

:D :D :D :D

Unmount the partition and change the permissions of the mount point, or it won't matter if the files mounted have the right permissions, as you won't be able to open the folder they're contained in.

You might further consider adding uid= and gid= options to the mount line in /etc/fstab, so that ownership of newly created files is not screwed up by one user for the others. Read man mount and man fstab for more details.

You might also move the mount point somewhere that it's a bit easier to deal with, like your /home directory, where it's easier to reach in the file tree, and the user has better ownership permissions. If multiple users need to access the partition, the mount can be symlinked into individual $HOME folders.

Hope this helps.

After reading everybody's advice and taking a look at the manuals for mount and fstab, I changed the fstab line to this:

/dev/hda1 /win-c ntfs umask=222,ro 0 0

I also changed the permissions of /win-c to 555 with the filesystem unmounted. However, when I mount the system, the permissions somehow become 441, and I still can't change them as root. Is there something big that I'm missing here?