Mounting a FAT volume read/write

alkaholic · 11-28-2007, 08:04 PM

My question makes it clear that I'm a newbie to Linux, and I know that similar questions have been posted in the past, but unfortunately none of the solutions that I've found posted are working for me. My problem is simple--I've added a FAT drive to my system, and I want to mount it read/write so that users can use the volume for network storage. I've tried about 20 different FSTAB lines and already lost three decent nights sleep over this--I'm hoping that my problem is as simple and stupid as I am, and I can just be done with this. To date the most successful FSTAB line that I've used has been:

/dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1 vfat rw,umask=0000,uid=500,gid=502 0 0

With this line the volume mounted successfully, showed proper user ownership, and allowed read/write access to the user and every member of the proper group. I'm happy...Samba's happy...everybody's happy...EXCEPT for the fact that I've ONLY got folder read/write access, the file access as shown in the properties of the drive show read only access for files. I can accordingly create folders on the drive but can't write files, which is not really proving very helpful. I tried adding the line fmask=0000 with no success. Any suggestions which you folks can offer would be overwhelmingly appreciated.

Thanks.

Bruce Hill · 11-29-2007, 03:15 AM

Well, I've come to your rescue. I read "man mount" and "man fstab" and this is my conclusion:

Code:

#/dev/sda2        /Storage         vfat        defaults         1   0
/dev/sda2        /Storage         vfat        users,umask=1000,rw,auto  1   0

The first line there is what Slackware chose, but since it's my PC, the second line was my choice.

When I created that there mount point, I chmoded it 777!

Code:

mingdao@wired_silas:~$ ls -al /Storage/
total 3534812
drwxrwxrwx 20 root root      16384 2007-11-29 17:08 ./
drwxr-xr-x 25 root root       8192 2007-11-28 22:52 ../
-rwxrwxrwx  1 root root      28160 2006-01-20 10:22 2004_contributions.xls*
-rwxrwxrwx  1 root root      18466 2006-01-20 16:34 2005_Contributions.ods*
-rwxrwxrwx  1 root root    3143806 2005-12-22 17:15 2006-Jan-Feb.pdf*
-rwxrwxrwx  1 root root     111496 2006-02-08 06:32 20060207deposit.jpg*
-rwxrwxrwx  1 root root      95894 2006-02-08 06:01 20060207deposit.jpg.pgp*
-rwxrwxrwx  1 root root    6103285 2006-02-02 10:34 AMD64\ ESCAPE!\ Screensaver.zip*

That's just a sample of the files, but I can assure you, whoever wants to can read/write to that puppy.

LlNUX · 11-30-2007, 07:05 AM

this howto might help: Mount linux partitions
or mount command it self

hope this helps