I recently installed Mepis 3.3.1 and have been having troubles setting up permissions on my hard drive partitions. Here's my fstab...

# Static entries below, do not use 'users' option in this area
/dev/hdc1 / reiserfs defaults,noatime,notail 0 0
/dev/hdc2 swap swap sw,pri=1 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devmode=0666 0 0
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0622 0 0
none /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hdc5 /home reiserfs defaults,noatime,notail 0 0
/dev/hdc6 /mnt/hdc6 reiserfs noauto,user,rw,exec,noatime,notail 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,users,dev,ro 0 0

Ideally I would like any user to be able to mount /dev/hdc6 as rw, but I've fiddled with fstab for a while and haven't been able to write to hdc6 from a normal account. Is something amis in my fstab? Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

Yep - you need to make sure that 'normal users' are in a group that allows writing to /mnt/hdc6.

The 'easiest' way to do this would be to make the permissions on this directory as drwxrwxrwx - so as root run 'chmod 777 /mnt/hdc6' and now everyone will be able to write to that directory.

Daniel

actually your fstab entry is wrong, its users not user

No, actually "user" is just fine. I've been using it in my fstab for years.

From the Unix man pages:

Common for all types of file system are the options ``noauto'' (do not mount when "mount -a" is given, e.g., at boot time), ``user'' (allow a user to mount), and ``owner'' (allow
device owner to mount), and ``_netdev'' (device requires network to be
available). The ``owner'' and ``_netdev'' options are Linux-specific.
For more details, see mount(8).