Ok here is my situation
I am trying to mount 3 file systems
they are
/dev/hda1
/dev/hdb1
/dev/hdb5

I have 3 target directories
/mnt/music
/mnt/storgae
/mnt/xp


I have tryied all sorts of ~/fstab entries and nothing seems to give me the permissions I want.

I have tried

/dev/hda5 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hda6 / ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,user,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0

#My own mount points listed here
/dev/hdb5 /mnt/music ntfs umask=000 0 0
/dev/hdb1 /mnt/storage ntfs umask=000 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/xp ntfs umask=000 0 0



Config 2 was
/dev/hda5 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hda6 / ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,user,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0

#My own mount points listed here
/dev/hdb5 /mnt/music ntfs umask=777 0 0
/dev/hdb1 /mnt/storage ntfs umask=777 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/xp ntfs umask=777 0 0

Config 3 was
/dev/hda5 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hda6 / ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,user,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0

#My own mount points listed here
/dev/hdb5 /mnt/music ntfs user,group 0 0
/dev/hdb1 /mnt/storage ntfs user,group 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/xp ntfs user,group 0 0

since then I have gone back to using umask
and going through all combinations of numbers

but none of these will give any user or even root write permissions on those mounts. I have come to my end with out resorting to some GUI program but that is why I came over to Slack was to move away from needing the GUI and wanting a kicking Linux Flav. beside if I have to use GUI's to do everything then I might as go back to Bill Gates Land right ? Ok I admit I like playing in config files and I feel like I have POWER. But not with my mount point grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.


Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Check out the Q&A in:

Once agian: Problems with mounting ntfs


Good Luck

THe link given above covers mount errors. Sounds like you mount successfully.

If you do, and can read but not write an ntfs partition that is _normal_. Writing to ntfs partitions is considered unstable - the ntfs filesystem code is usually compiled without write support.

If you want to be able to write to the ntfs partition, you may need to recompile the ntfs driver to enable write support.

Yep your right I can mount but just cant write to those mount points and as you can tell there all NTFS and I am not willing to loose 40GB of data to just be able to read/write and execute on that filesystem.
So I think I will figure out how to reconfigure the driver for NTFS support and go from there other wise ............. who knows what my next step will be.

Thanks for all your help
will let you all know if that worked

I am not an expert [noob] but writing to ntfs from linux is very dangerous.

It is often mentioned that you should only mount ntfs as read only.

Many poeple have corrupted their data by writing to ntfs from linux.


I mounted it as ro and can access and copy files to linux.

Good Luck

as Wonderer said.
It's deemed dangerous by most people that use Linux and fot ntfs on other disks.
My advice is get a hold of PartitionMagic8 and use that to convert the drives you need/want to write to into FAT32. That way you can use them from Windows and Linux with no danger of screwing up.
I tried to compile in the support for writing to NTFS and i'm really happy that i had made a backup of that partition. Everything just went wrong with it. (maybe cause treid to copy a movie over to it)
My setup looks like this.

hda1 =xp (ntfs) (50gb)
hda2= fat32 (65gb)
hda3=NTFS (6gb)
hdb1-5=ext2 (40 gb)
hdb12=fat32 (40 gb)
hdc=cdrom
hdd1=fat32 (120 gb) (my mp3's)

In the kernel configuration you will need to make sure you change "Code maturity level options"->"Prompt for development and/or incomplete code/drivers" to yes, so that "NTFS write support" will appear under "Filesystem support". Select that as yes, then recompile the kernel. This should solve your problems, but bear in mind NTFS write support is very dangerous and could cause severe data loss.

Thanks to all I changed the partition type to Fat32 and reloaded all information back on the drives. Figured it was better that way instead of getting linux to write to the NTFS and loosing all information.