I recently installed mandrake 10.1 official and have had nothing but trouble with my extenal drives. I have one pen drive and one lacie 20gb drive. It finds the pen drive just fine but the I constantly have to mount the Lacie and then it won't let me writing to it. I have done all I know to give my login permissions to write to everything. then, knoqueror stopped working.

I decided to login as root. everything works fine. my drives load up, i can write to them.

is being in root a big deal. seems like linux frowns on this. Is it really than different than begin logged in as administrator on a win box?

only weirdness in root, no right click menu on desktop and the backspace on my keyboard doesn't backspace when I hold it down. I have to press the backspace button for every deletion i want to make.

thanks for any insights

Actually it's equally stupid in both situations, just
Windows users don't mind as much ;}


Cheers,
Tink

check your /etc/fstab and make sure you have the 'user' option under opts eg:

dont't have the noatime,noauto piece. it does say user though.

You don't really want noatime in the first place, because
that will stop recording file-access times. It's something
that you'd want on a heavily loaded database server (because
it will somewhat accelerate disk writes) or if you're a
gentoo user (because performance is everything).


Cheers,
Tink

What filesystem do you have on the devices?

what do you mean by filesystem? it's fat32. not sure if that is what you are looking for.

FAT doesn't have any permissions schemes, so when Linux mounts that type of filesystem it has to emulate permissions. Options given in /etc/fstab or to mount on the command-line determine who owns the files and what rights they have. You not being able to write to the device as a normal user can probably be fixed by messing with those settings.

If you mount it manually and the user option is specified in /etc/fstab you should own the files, what does 'ls -ld /mnt/msd' look like after you've mounted it?

You might possibly have to mount the disk with the gid and uid options or with some default permissions because FAT drives don't support file ownerships and permissions in the same way as the unix-type filesystems.

this is what my fstab looks like:

/dev/hda1 / ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/hda6 /home ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/sda1 /mnt/Lacie1 vfat umask=0,user,defaults 0 0
/dev/sda5 /mnt/Lacie2 vfat umask=0,user,defaults 0 0
/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom auto umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,ro,exec,users 0 0
none /mnt/dvd supermount dev=/dev/sr0,fs=auto,ro,exec,--,umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,users 0 0
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/removable auto umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,kudzu,codepage=850,noauto,exec,users 0 0
/dev/hdb2 /mnt/win_c vfat umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda5 swap swap defaults 0 0

tyrantworm,

o answer your original question, no, for you it is not a big deal. for others that maybe have multiple user accounts or have security concerns then yes it is a big deal.

All of your problems are permission based; root just has permission to do everything so all you have to work out is what you need to do as a user and add that in...

found it,

http://www.control-escape.com/linux/lx-filesys.html

would you mind logging in as root and giving us the output from it'll confirm your file-system types for all mounted disks

i'll need a bit more. i typed in df -hT into a console and it returned that I needed more commands to run this.

Ignoring the gentoo comment: noatime is also desirable on flash media, because they have a limited lifetime of # of writes. All my compact flash and USB drives (except my enclosure-d disk drive) get mounted noatime: not for performance, but for the sake of not burning them up. If you use a GUI on flash media, every browsing of the directory is seen as a read on ALL files.

add the noauto option, which will stop it from automounting. I had the same problem when mine mounted at boot time. if the user mounted it manually then all was fine.