Alright, on my very happy 13th install of this OS this week. It seems to come up with a new way to need to eat a hole in my harddrive everytime I install it. This time it's almost like last time...

I try to access my windows files on the other partition, and come to find that the partition has no mount point! I already did this one today so I went and set up

The last time I messed everything up, I figure it's because I set the mount point for the home directory, and effectively kicked my user out.

So I make a empty directory for windows to let me call wallpapers, and .inf and .sys files so I can get the the ndiswrapper project I started on this morning, and am 2 steps back from where I started!

This is all done in root. So all is good in the world, I reboot.
I log back in and find I can't access the windows file, because it's locked out by root! OH BOY! No problem, I'll just go and change my file permissions.

So, now I find myself here, I've got and it's -R rwx coming out of my ears. I'm tired, and I feel like I've wasted my day, mainly because I have. I still can't access my new directory even though I did:
Then rebooted, it still refuses to let me in the folder... IDK, I really tried to get into this, I have school, and it's almost done. I can go waste my time on the cold war rewriting history and writing up my own profile. I'm really not a happy camper, and anyone who installs an OS twice a day for a week straight because they can't get it to do one simple thing would be in the same boat. Sure there's tons of information out there, but none of it can help me. Water water everywhere, but not a damn drop to drink...

You didn't take that literally, did you? [username] needs to be replaced with your username. Also your mount point seems to be /winxp, not /windows.

/mnt/hda1 /winxp ntfs defaults 0 0

needs to be

/dev/hda1 /winxp ntfs defaults 0 0

or even better

/dev/hda1 /winxp ntfs user 0 0

No idea what and why you chowned around there but after mkdir the /winxp directory doesn't need any changes or chowning. File system permissions are set at mount time and thus defined in fstab.

You might want to try out ntfs-3g to gain write access on you windows partition.

Chmod does not work with Windows permissions: http://slackwiki.org/Windows_Partitions

You need to use the umask option. Using dmask and fmask would be better. You can also use the uid and gid options to change the owner and group of the partition. The dmask and fmask determine the permissions for all directories and files respectively.

See "man 8 mount" for more options.

It looks like no matter what directory I have it mount in, I'm getting goated by this stinking file permission. I can mkdir anything I want in root, it's just when I mount the info I want in the directory if locks out everyone but root! I'm really hating this...

I just don't know. I'm not stupid, and I REALLY don't like not knowing. Thanks for your replies... I just don't have the time for this. Thank you though, it's much appreciated.

If you need to access your NTFS partition to retrieve your files use a Knoppix-5.1.1 liveCD or whatever recent version that you can get. You may be able to change the permissions also using Knoppix. If getting your files is your first priority use the Knoppix disc to mount your NTFS partition.