Problem:
I get this error message when trying to make a directory on a vfat partition as a NON-ROOT user. As Root, it works without problems:
[abhi@sulphur1 ~]$ mkdir /media/SHARED/bb
mkdir: cannot create directory `/media/SHARED/bb': Permission denied

Version:
H/w: Lenovo Thinkpad t61, centrino duo, 1 gig ram
S/w: Fedora 9. #uname -a = Linux sulphur1 2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686 #1 SMP Mon Aug 4 14:08:11 EDT 2008 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

Additional Info:
- The partition in question is vfat formatted. My intent was to create 4 partitions for this dual-boot machine... XP, Linux, Swap, Shared. This is the 'Shared' partition... with it's purpose being to act like a common storage medium between reboots of Win and Fedora.

- I can write to the ntfs XP partition just fine as a non-root user. The problem is only with the vfat partiton. The nfts partition just has the "defaults" option in fstab.

- fdisk -l output:
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 4889 36960808+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 9564 10337 5851440 12 Compaq diagnostics
/dev/sda3 4890 9563 35335440 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5 8074 9563 11264368+ b W95 FAT32
/dev/sda6 4890 4917 200781 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 4917 8073 23864526 8e Linux LVM

Troubleshooting Done:
- Added this line to /etc/fstab followed by a "mount -o remount /dev/sda5":
/dev/sda5 /media/SHARED defaults,user,exec,dev,suid,sgid,uid=500,gid=500,mode=0775,umask=000

- changed owner of both the directory /media/SHARED and /dev/sda5 to user "abhi". "abhi has uid of 500.
[abhi@sulphur1 ~]$ ls -la /dev/sda5
brw-rw---- 1 abhi disk 8, 5 2008-08-29 12:53 /dev/sda5
[abhi@sulphur1 ~]$ ls -la /media/
drwxr-xr-x 6 root abhi 8192 2008-08-29 14:41 SHARED

- Reverted changes to defaults in /etc/fstab. Here is what the mount command gives presently:
[abhi@sulphur1 ~]$ mount
.
removed other info
.
/dev/sda5 on /media/SHARED type vfat (rw,umask=0000)




Any guidance on how i can give non-root users "write permissions" on this vfat partition would be appreicated.

Thank you!

Here's what my fstab says for a FAT32 partition, which I can write to:
I'm running Ubuntu 8.04 rather than Fedora though. Hope it helps.

Have you really a group named abhi ? Isn't it a user name rather than a group name ?
The permissions give only write access to root, even if a group named abhi exists.

Hi, thank you for your replies and helping me out. The problem is solved. Here's what was done:

a. remove everything from fstab that i had modified.
b. mkdir /media/SHARED
c. chown abhi /media/SHARED
d. Added this in the fstab file and followed it with a mount -a:
/dev/sda5 /media/SHARED vfat defaults,rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=hal,uid=500 0 0
e. rebooted to make sure the changes persisted... and they do! I can write to the vfat partition now as a non-root user.

In Fedora, whenever one adds a user to the system, a corresponding group is also created. reflected with the gid being the same as the uid in /etc/passwd and /etc/group. In this case, the group "abhi" has gid 500.

<<The permissions give only write access to root>>
I too feel that was the problem. ref my previous post, that chown command fixed this.

Thank you.