Ok, so I've just put together a dual-boot machine with WinXP and RedHat 9. I've got 3 drives with several partitions on one of them. I've formatted 3 large data partitions as FAT32 so that they can be accessed through both Win and Linux. I've added the mounting info. to my /etc/fstab (see below) and I'm able to read/write to the data partitions as I had intended, so far so good. Now, I have a need to do some shell scripting for some data analysis. The data are all residing on the vfat mounted partitions. The shell scripts won't run from the vfat drives but will run from any ext3 partition. When I take the commands out of the script and run them individually from the command line, they work just fine. Any idea what's going on and how to fix it?

A simple script:
#!/bin/bash
echo "Hi"

Output when I run the script from vfat partition (/mnt/win_h):
$ ./sscript
bash: ./sscript: /bin/bash: bad interpreter: Permission denied

Output when same script run from ext3 partition (/tmp):
$ ./sscript
Hi

My fstab:
$ more /etc/fstab
LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/sda5 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/hdd4 /mnt/zip auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0
/dev/sda6 /mnt/win_g vfat users,owner,rw,umask=000 0 0
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/win_f vfat users,owner,rw,umask=000 0 0
/dev/hde1 /mnt/win_h vfat users,owner,rw,umask=000 0 0

You'll need to mount the partition so that all files can be executed or probably more secure - run it with:
sh /path/to/script

David,
I took your advice and did the following:

From /mnt/win_h/ I ran the script and got:
$ bash ./sscript
Hi

I'm really glad that worked, but I don't really understand why it did. Is there something I can do so that I can simply run ./sscript and it'll work from any partition?

Thanks so much for your help,
Adam

If you want to execute the script directly you will need to have the execute bit set on the file. Since you can't chmod a file on a vfat filesystem you need to set the permissions on all files when the partition is mounted.