Hello,

My computer has two harddisk. Disk 0 contains the Linx os, disk 1 is for windows.
Now I have the following problem:

- the windows disk has been set to read-only by Linux during install.

- root is the only one having read-permission on this disk.

- because of the read-only attribute, root cannot modify the rights for user.

- user MUST have read-access.

How can I make the disk read-write for root???
I use Mandrake 9.2....
If anybody knows how to achieve this, I shall appreciate if you want to share this knowledge with me

Kind regards,

Schmurff

Is the Win disk NTFS?
If so there is no safe way to write to the disk.
Use a FAT32 partition.

Assuming that your win disk isn't NTFS, as CoolAJ6 said, you should be able to edit /etc/fstab to include the <rw> option for all users, and then remount the disk (otherwise there's probably a gui for this in the Mandrake Control Center, under hardware - I haven't used Mandrake recently).

the rw option by itself does not, to my knowledge to date, allow write access to windows fat partitions. the umask option does this. assuming you do not care who writes to your windows partitions an fstab entry may look like:

/dev/hda1 /mnt/winC vfat auto,owner,umask=0000,exec,rw 0 0

i think the umask is the permissions of the partition when mounted. the exec, rw options are what users are allowed to do on that partition. the 2 are mutually exclusive though. for instance, even though you allow users to read/write/exec on that partition, they will not be able to unless you mount that partition to allow them to use their permissions.

Unfortunately, the disk in question contains ntfs-partitions.

The line in my /etc/fstab looks like this:

"/dev/hdb6 /mnt/win-e ntfs ro,iocharset=iso8859-1 0 0"

If I change 'ro' to 'rw', it becomes impossible to access any partitions on the disk.

??????????

Schmurff

At the moment, there is no safe way to write to a NTFS partition. That said, there are utilities that allow you to write to NTFS, but they are very much in a beta stage and I would not recommend you use them unless you don't care if you NTFS partition gets corrupt . What I did was to create an 8GB partition on my WinXP drive to move files between OS's.

Baldrick

In my experience captive-ntfs is indeed quite safe, just not always really a performance king.

if you are using ntfs file system, then you will have to d/w and compile a patch for your kernel.
if its a fat32 file system, then just edit your /etc/fstab.
in the line containing your windows partition info, typically
/dev/hdb .............
add the keyword 'user' in the fourth column, which will contain the keyword 'default' (generally).
i think that maybe you will have to delete the default keyword, just try both ways.

Hello everybody who replied to my question,

Thank you for your help.
It is not my objective to write to my ntfs-partitions. I only need to set the drive writeable in order to enable root to make it readeable for user. User wants to read his huge collection of mp3-files on this drive without the need to copy them to his Linux-drive.
By default the Mandrake-installer sets the drive on readonly for root, thus preventing to change the rights.
This problem feels like running in a circle...

use umask again in your fstab. you don't need to make use the rw option at all.

umask=0222

will mount your ntfs partition with the default permissions as r-x r-x r-x and change the rw option back to ro.

now with mandrake, you may have some issue with their supermount thing. i'm not sure as i don't use mandy. just, for now, make the changes to your /etc/fstab file and see if that does it for you.