Hi, I'm quite new to Linux and love it. But I have a small problem. I have both FC1 and FC3 installed and want to use an ext3 partition (rather than a FAT one) to share files between them. It should be in such a way that even a non-root user would be able to write to it. The entry that I added in fstab is this:

/dev/hda14 /mnt/Common1 auto noauto,users,exec,rw 0 0

The problem is that though I was able to mount it, only root has the permissions to write to it. I saw somewhere that this is because ext3 has file ownerships and permissions (while FAT doesn't have them). The uid and gid of the non-root user in both FC1 and FC3 are both 500.

So, what has to be done so that the non-root user in both FC1 and FC3 can mount the partition with rw permissions? Can somebody help me? Thanks.

Try this :

Hi, I gave the entry as you said. But it didn't work. It produced the following error:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda14,
or too many mounted file systems

I already have an FAT partition mounted using the 'umask=0000' option and it works well, granting rw permission to the non-root user. So, I removed the FAT entry and tried again. Still the problem persists. I then tried 'auto' and 'ext2'instead of 'ext3' as fs option. Still the results are the same. If I remove the 'umask' option, the filesystem mounts alright, but only root will have the write permission as I said before.

It seems as if 'umask' option work with FAT, but not with ext3.

Any ideas??

Thanks.

You need to change the permissions of the directory. The command is chmod.
http://www.tu-berlin.de/zrz/dienste/...ges/chmod.html

If you want to make the directory read / writeable by all then
chmod 777 /mnt/Common1

Unless you do not want the partition mounted all of the time just use the the following for your fstab
/dev/hda14 /mnt/Common1 ext3 defaults 2 0

Here you go dude

Have fun.

Hi, Thanks a lot everyone! It worked with chmod. Just one doubt. I had tried chmod 777 on this directory before. But Nautilus did'nt allow me to copy a file or create a folder in it. Then I assumed that chmod hadn't worked. Even now the problem remained. I unmounted and remounted the partition and checked again. Still the problem was there. But I was able to do these operations through the command-line (as a normal, non-root user itself). And once this 'inauguration' was done, Nautilus allowed the normal operations. It might seem funny. Is this probably a problem with Nautilus, or is there something else at work here? It appears as if an initial write on the filesystem by a normal user through the command line was necessary.

This happened in FC1. I do not know whether Konqueror or the browsers in FC3 had the same problem. I was'nt able to try it as the filesystem was already written upon and showed no problems after that. I'll try to reformat the partition and attempt it again.

Thanks once again for all your help,
Ilyushin