Mathieu,
Thats great. I have already put the permanent mount on, following advice from above, however, I didn't touch any parameters apart from default 0 0 whatever that means. I note you have given paramaters, users, is self explanatory, I presume gid ,is Group IDs, What are the mask entries?
My hda2 data store is split into the appropriate users directories. Is it possible to assign a different mount to each user directory, eg hda2/documents/ian as one mount, and hda2/documents/kids as another?

Lone_nut,
It sounds what I need, subject to the above comment, but where do I put this command? How do I implement it?
I'm lost when you mention original and new file. Surely, I put a linking file (is that the new file?) onto my desktop directory, with a pointer of some sort to my target file/directory (is that the original file?) I'm guessing you mean to open a new text file, in my desktop directory, with the above command? But I don't think that interpretation makes sense!

Referring to my other thread about boot priorities, My kids are so pleased and excited with LINUX, they are now always booting to LINUX, and I've re-prioritised "Satan's O/S" to second place!

umask set the permissions for all directories and files.
dmask set the permissions for all directories only.
fmask set the permissions for all files only.

If you want to mount an NTFS partition, take a look at this link.
http://www.justlinux.com/nhf/Filesys...lesystems.html

No. When you mount hda2, you mount the entire partition. However, you can create soft links using the ln command.
To use this command, open a console window

For example, hda2 is mounted on /mnt/share:
This will create a link to the /mnt/share/ian directory.

To get more info on any command, open a console (terminal) window and type:
To quit the MAN page, type 'q'.