LinuxQuestions.org - How can I adjust my permissions so that I can mount NTFS drives without the terminal?

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How can I adjust my permissions so that I can mount NTFS drives without the terminal?

I am running the current testing version of Debian, with GNOME as my desktop environment. How can I set it up so that I can mount my drives merely by clicking on the "mount" option in the "Computer" screen? Here's a picture so you can tel what I am talking about: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...uterscreen.png Whenever I try to mount it by right-clicking and selecting mount, it tells me that I lack the permission to do so. How can I easily mount and access my Vista drives via this screen? Any help is appreciated.

I am not sure about this, but you might want to add the word user to the mount options listed for this partition in /etc/fstab. If you don't know what I am talking about, please post the contents of /etc/fstab. And be aware the before modifying a config file (such as /etc/fstab) it is always a good idea to back up the existing one to make sure you can always go back to where you were.

Here are the contents of my /etc/fstab file

Code:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.

#

# <file system> <mount point>  <type>  <options>      <dump>  <pass>

proc            /proc          proc    defaults        0      0

/dev/sda7      /              ext3    errors=remount-ro 0      1

/dev/sda6      none            swap    sw              0      0

/dev/scd0      /media/cdrom0  udf,iso9660 user,noauto    0      0

Here is the result of the command fdisk -l

Code:

Disk /dev/sda: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes

16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 620181 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes

Disk identifier: 0x97646c29



  Device Boot      Start        End      Blocks  Id  System

/dev/sda1              3      20320    10240000  1c  Hidden W95 FAT32 (LBA)

/dev/sda2  *      20320      330409  156284928    7  HPFS/NTFS

/dev/sda3          330411      620180  146044080    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)

/dev/sda5          330411      557766  114586620    7  HPFS/NTFS

/dev/sda6          617833      620180    1183360+  82  Linux swap / Solaris

/dev/sda7          557766      617831    30273201  83  Linux



Partition table entries are not in disk order

My Windows drives are /dev/sda2 and /dev/sda5.

I may have gone a bit further beyond my knowledge than I should have. I was expecting fstab to already have entries for these partitions, but I see it does not.

So what I am suggesting requires that you (as root) create a couple of directories:

Code:

mkdir /mnt/sda2

mkdir /mnt/sda5

and then add these lines to /etc/fstab:

Code:

/dev/sda2      /mnt/sda2      auto    noauto,user      0      0

/dev/sda5      /mnt/sda5      auto    noauto,user      0      0

This should allow any user to mount these partitions from the command line with commands like:

Code:

mount /dev/sda2

So I am hoping it will work in the GUI as well.

I was not sure the specification for the file system (3rd column) so I specified "auto" hoping the OS could figure it out. You might want to try the command line mount command I showed above just to make sure it can. When you've demonstrated it works that way, try it from the GUI.

I am not sure how permissions work for the NTFS file system (accessed from Linux). From what I've just seen while searching for info on this issue, it might work the same as as for FAT file systems. I am familiar with that. It may be necessary to add some more options in to get the access you want.

Another possibility would be to change fstab such that these partitions are automatically mounted at boot time. If you do that, I am pretty sure you will need some more options to allow users other than root to actually access the files.