While I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer, I've been using linux since around 1998 and it's my 99% of the time OS at home. Having said that, I'm having a mounting issue. I have 3 fvat partiions all with the same entry in /etc/fstab. I like to have them all mounted rw so all users and apps have access...there isn't anything important on the drives. The funny thing is that one of them mounts as rw but changes to ro as soon as any applications access the partition. As far as I can tell I can edit files using shell commands but as soon as a gui app accesses the partition it switches to ro and not even foot can modify files on it until I umount and mount it again. And then the same thing happens...I can edit files through the cli but as soon as a access the partion with a something, say firefox, the partition goes ro. The other 2 vfat partitions don't do this...fstab is the same for all 3 vfat partitions. What might the issue here?

I'm running mandriva le2005.

Post your /etc/fstab.
Also, post the output of

Thanks for the reply. I finally figured it out. I decided I better backup the data I needed and in doing so I noticed tons and tons of goofey filenames. The kind with illegal characters in them. I don't know if corruption is the proper term but after I got the data I needed, I reformatted the partition and restored my data and things were just dandy. So, the bottom line is the fstab for my 3 vfat partitions all look the same and do what I want. For the record here is what the fstab on my Mandriva LE2005 system that gives everyone rw access looks like:

/dev/hda9 /mnt/win_c vfat umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850 0 0
/dev/hdb1 /mnt/win_c2 vfat umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850 0 0
/dev/hdb5 /mnt/win_d vfat umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850 0 0

I'm not sure what did this dastardly thing to my data. I'll post if I figure it out.