I am trying to edit fstab so my sdb1 drive (320 GB SATA HDD) mounts at boot. Unfortunately, even after saving and making the permissions read only, the thing returns to the previous state, including permissions, at boot. I thought I saw somewhere that there is an update for fstab to fix one bug or another, but all my packages are current. I couldn't find a fstab package in synaptic anyway.

Any help with this strange thing?

The /etc/fstab file is simply a text file containing information on how to mount the device. Perhaps you could post the entry with sdb1 in it and information such as the filesystem used.

move the entry above the #Dynamic Entries line, all that stuff is rewritten on boot

Automount drives: http://www.mepis.org/docs/en/index.php/Automount_drives

The drive looks like an internal sata drive rather than an external usb or firewire drive so the OP wants to have it mounted at boot as the /dev/sdaN partitions are.

I've never heard of Dynamic Entries in /etc/fstab. It may be a Mephis specific, unless it is to segregate lines such as "usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0"

Information on the filesystem created on /dev/sdb1 might be helpful:
sudo file -s /dev/sdb1

Reading the man mount page will provide information on what options are available for the filesystem and writing the entries for /etc/fstab.

If Mephis has a partitioner program, it may detect the partitions and create an fstab entry for you if you enter the mount point to use.

jschiwal: It is a mepis specific problem, with every new release we get flooded by this question.

Yea!!! All fixed. I don't remember having to do this in the last SuSE version I used.

Anyway, I went to the link Basel provided and changed the entry per the instructions. Thank you all for your replies. Mos also had the right answer. I searched LQ and Googled for an answer before I posted, so I wonder what search term I should have used to get results?

Searching a mepis forum would have been wiser, or even our wiki. Suse didn't have that problem because mepis has a tool that regenerates the fstab on boot