Access to Windows FAT32 Drive
 

Hello everyone, Linux newbie here but happy to be on it!

I set up my machine as follows (dual boot):
Partition1: NTFS (Windows)
Partition2: FAT32(Shared Data - I hope!)
Partition3: ReiserFS (Linux)

I have everything set up (as a sidenote, the installation of SUSE was a BREEZE -- MUCH better than my last attempt at Linux several years ago!), however I get the message that I don't have permissions in my own account to access the /data mount (Partition2), and root shows as the owner. No problem, and I go off to log in as root to assign me as the owner. However, it then tells me that root does not have permissions to change the owner of the files and folders under /data.

????

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong here?

Should have searched a little more on my own -- found the solution. I didn't have umask set up for the mount in fstab. Set umask=000 and it was resolved.

That umask thingy is a trap for young players. Its nice when a distribution sets it up for you.

OK, I spoke too soon -- still having some sort of trouble here.

On the surface, I can create files and folders on the data drive, however the owner of these files is root. As I set permissions so everyone has rwxd on the mount, I can do what I need.

However, I'm trying to set up Firefox to use this filesystem for data - including my Firefox profile. I keep getting the message that the profile is in use -- even though I'm the one who created it, and Firefox isn't open!

I know this isn't the Firefox forums, but I'm hoping someone's seen this before. Here is what I have set up in fstab:

/dev/hda4 / reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 1
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs noauto 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
/dev/dvdrecorder /media/dvdrecorder subfs noauto,fs=cdfss,ro,procuid,nosuid,nodev,exec,iocharset=utf8 0 0
/dev/cdrom /media/cdrom subfs noauto,fs=cdfss,ro,procuid,nosuid,nodev,exec,iocharset=utf8 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy subfs noauto,fs=floppyfss,procuid,nodev,nosuid,sync 0 0
/dev/hda3 /data vfat users,umask=000 0 0

Any suggestions at all for those who have this set up?

Firefox occasionally locks up. Go to /home/<yourusername>/.mozilla and look for a file with a padlock on it and delete that file. If you use to start Firefox, you can create a backup profile as a workaround.