I have a new Iomega ZIP 100 USB drive, and for some reason, only the administrator can access it or mount it. And even then, I need to use GTKzip.

I think what I need to do for others to access it is to give mounting permissions to all useres (because whenever I try to do it outside of root it gives me a permissions error).

What I suppose I'm trying to ask is...how do I set read/write/execute permissions to directories, mounting and devices? (I know I should already know this, but...I haven't had alot of time to learn Linux lately)

According to man mount

(iii) Normally, only the superuser can mount file systems. However,
when fstab contains the user option on a line, then anybody can mount
the corresponding system.

Thus, given a line
/dev/cdrom /cd iso9660 ro,user,noauto,unhide
any user can mount the iso9660 file system found on his CDROM using the
command
mount /dev/cdrom
or
mount /cd
For more details, see fstab(5). Only the user that mounted a filesys-
tem can unmount it again. If any user should be able to unmount, then
use users instead of user in the fstab line. The owner option is simi-
lar to the user option, with the restriction that the user must be the
owner of the special file. This may be useful e.g. for /dev/fd if a
login script makes the console user owner of this device.

Further than that, if you use the users option (ie the plural of user) then it won't matter which user mounted it, any other user can umount it.

You may also want to look into setting the UID or MASK for the filesystem.

I added this line to the end of fstab:

/dev/sda /media/zip0 auto ro,noauto,user,exec 0 0

And, like magic, everything suddenly recognized /media/zip0 exactly the way I wanted them to.
However, everytime I try and access zip0 the zip drive makes some noise, but all I get is an error saying it doesn't know what the filesystem for the zip disk is.

First, where do I specify the filesystem for a device (as in, what part of the fsab entry), and
Second, what is the filesystem for a zip drive?

EDIT:
Forgot to mention...

There is a line in fstab that looks like it has to do with a usb device.

usbdevfs /proc/bus/usb usbdevfs noauto 0 0

Is this important for the zip drive?

Nevermind, I found the answer in another thread...
http://linuxquestions.org/questions/...filesystem+zip

Thanks everybody!