Even though the drives themselves are read only, how to I add permission for normal user to read the drive? It seems to be mounted, but when i double click it says "You do not have enough permission to read file:/mnt/hda1. or same thing for sda1.

Thanks.

Change the drive partition settings in /etc/fstab to 'user' from 'root'

Put an appropriate umask value in the 4th field of the relevant entry in /etc/fstab - such as

umask=0222

typical options in the 4th field for an NTFS filesystem are:

umask=0222,auto,ro

OK thanks for the tips. I didn't see anywhere where it said 'root' so I don't know where to put 'user' I added the unmask=0222

Now my whole fstab looks like this:
/dev/hdc1 / ext3 defaults 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
/dev/hdc6 /home ext3 defaults 1 2
none /mnt/cdrom supermount dev=/dev/scd0,fs=udf:iso9660,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-1 0 0
none /mnt/cdrom2 supermount dev=/dev/scd1,fs=udf:iso9660,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-1 0 0
none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=ext2:vfat,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1 ntfs user,ro,dev,exec,suid,defaults,unmask=0222 0 0
/dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1 ntfs defaults,unmask=0222 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hdc5 swap swap defaults 0 0


Is there any way i could change these permissions without restarting? If I unmount and mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1 would that mount with these new permissions?

Its

umask

not

unmask

also use:

mount -a

as Root user to remount without rebooting

For this line above use:

/dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1 ntfs auto,ro,umask=0222 0 0

cool. It worked when i rebooted but it didn't work when I put that command into a shell as root. I wasn't 100% clear on what I was supposed to do there so I tried

mount -a

which didn't appear to do anything but give me a help readout, I assume for some incorrect usage somewhere and

mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1 ntfs user,ro,dev,exec,suid,defaults,unmask=0222 0 0

did the same thing I think. Well never the less, rebooting did the trick and now I can access those drives!

Thanks.

Glad to be of help

remember, the mount command from the command line uses a different "syntax" to the corresponding entry in /etc/fstab - that's why using what is essentially an fstab entry for a temporary mount via ther comamnd line will cause errors etc.