hello all-
im kinda going off very little sleep here and for the life of me i jus cant remember what to add in fstab to give a normal user write permissions. i jus wanna give wite permissions to a couple partitions- /backup which i wanna use as its name states for backups lol, its formatted with reiserfs, and the other partition is /srv which is also reiserfs, any help to this burned out guy would be greatly appreciated

If it is a reiser partition then you don't need to alter fstab. Just assign the permissions with chown and chmod.

This is a problem I have had for a l-o-o-o-o-o-o-n-g time as well. I use an external 40G firewire drive, formatted as a single reiserfs partition, for my backups. No matter what I've tried in fstab, ordinary users (i.e. not root) do not have write access to the volume. I have tried the obvious "rw" setting in fstab, along with "users" and "users" as well. I have tried making sure that the mount points AND the associated /dev/ files are all rw accessible to user, group and others. I have even added my userid to group "disk". NONE of this has worked. In the end, I must always su to root, create a backup directory on the device and then chown it to my userid.

I have begun to wonder if this is some sort of standard linux security thing - only root has access to the root of a harddrive?

Is there ANY way anyone has found to allow ordinary users to access the root directory of a hard drive without the above "go to root, create a user specific folder and chown it" approach? Thanks!

aahhhhhh thanks so much david_ross, chown never even crossed my mind for some reason

syphoncode.32, no problem.

mac57, see my previous post - just change the permissions on the root of the partition.