Great ... where is my fstab
 

Well, I managed to solve one of my probs from my last thread. Which means I can now surf the web from my RedHat. But the other big question asked there still keeps puzzling me.

I had a nice fstab file prepared to mount my Win98 partitions to. It worked. Until I rebooted. Then I saw that RH rewrote that file and thus deleted my precious mounting info.

Does anybody have any idea why that's so and how to stop that? It's annoying!

hrmm, are you absolutely positive 100% sure you saved the file before exit? maybe you aren't properly using the text editor that you open the fstab file with.

I used an Emacs within a console (no GUI). Yes the file was saved. There even was the backup file Emacs created for me. And I managed using that edited fstab right after fiddling with it. I.e. I could mount the newly entered partitions. But not only was the fstab changed back once I rebooted the machine, also the directories which I had created as mount points ("/c", "/d" and "/e") were gone.

make sure u are root

type su, then gedit /etc/fstab

then u can save

well he would have to be root regardless cause if he was non-root, he would of gotten an error message of permission denied when trying to save the file and when trying to make a folder in /mnt..
the only thing i have seen referenced to this is by disabling kudzu otherwise i don't know.

How do I do that?

Oh, and another curious fact about those mounts: I create the directories which serve as mount points, then I mount the partitions. So far, so good, so tasty.

So why is it I cannot write to any of those mounted partitions unless I am root. Oh, I get it, the access rights to those directories are write-only for non-roots (or rather: non owners).

Well, hey, I am root, ain't I? So it should be a piece of pie changing those rights? Yeah, or so I thought. Redhat just laughs and tells me that I am not allowed to change the rights to write access? Then what am I root for?

So. What do I do now?

What are you mounting? Certain filesystems don't support permissions, so they're "stuck" on certain permissions. You specify permissions for these by putting "umask=<number>" in the options of fstab. Whatever permissions you specify here applies to everything in the filesystem.

Assuming you're talking about the Win98 before with a FAT32 filesystem? - as aaa mentioned you need a umask value in the relevant /etc/fstab line.

A umask value of 000 should be sufficient.

(just substitute in your Partition and Mount point in place of my example ones)

/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat defaults,umask=000 0 0