I have a couple of FAT32 partitions that I'd like to at least read as a normal user. Tried cding, permission denied. I do an ls -l and it tells me:

drwxr--r--

I believe I need execute privileges in order to read a directory, plain read won't do. So I try

chmod 755 directory

Then ls -l and the permissions haven't changed. I'm thinking it must be an option I'm missing out, or perhaps accidentally adding, in my /etc/fstab file. Here are the entries, hope you can help.

/dev/hda7 /mnt/win/home vfat auto,user,rw 0 0
/dev/hda10 /mnt/win/dl vfat rw,auto,user 0 0

First of all, change auto to noauto in your fstab

Second, what windows ver are you using..?

XP, but the partitions are formatted as FAT32. Why change the auto to noatuo? I'm the only user on this comptuer.

change your fstab to read.........noauto means the filesystem will not automagically be mounted upon boot, if you do this you need to create config files on your desktop, in order to mount the filesystem when you want..........

Is it XP Home or professional? Also, XP is written in NTFS.. im surprised that it shows as FAT32..

Anyway, you may need to go into your properties in XP and check the permissions. You might have to choose "share this folder with others" and "let users change my files" to get the permissions to work in Linux. XP defaults all folders as read only.

Hope this helps

ryeman it's FAT32 because that's how I formatted them...

320MB, I'll try changing my fstab to that when I get home.

320MB, I tried changing my fstab to what you said, unmounted the disk, remounted and tried to change partitions but it still won't let me. Anyone else have this problem, or know how to fix it?

#mount -t vfat -o umask=000 /dev/hda5 /mnt/win_d
umask=000 makes others could access filesystem mounted by root.