automounted sda5 works for root only & I can't change it (Fixed)
Posts: 363
I have installed Mepis 6.0 final. I have two hard drives permanently installed, hda, a 60 GB ide drive, and sda, a 250 GB SATA drive. Both have FAT32 & ext3 partitions.
I want to persistently automount sda5, which is FAT32 and used for data storage. I modified fstab and sda5 does automount and I can view it and any files there in Konqueror. The problem is that everything there belongs to root, and I cannot change ownership or permissions. I'm told I don't have sufficient authority, even as root.
OTOH, if I use KDiskFree or umount to unmount the partition, and then remount it, the user is me, andy1, the group is users, and all is well.
I have tried as many variations as I can think of in fstab. They all work to automount sda5, but until I unmount it and remount it, I cannot use it except as root. 
Does anybody know what's going on and how I can fix it? Also, a pointer to a good explanation of all the options in fstab would be nice. I've found a few, but perhaps they're out of date since they don't list all the options used in the Mepis fstab.
Many thanks!
Andy
fstab
Posts: 363
Sure, but remember that I have tried a number of variants for sda5, with no change in the behavior.
# Pluggable devices are handled by uDev, they are not in fstab
/dev/hda7 / ext3 defaults,noatime 1 1
/dev/hda8 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/hda9 /home ext3 defaults,noatime 1 2
/dev/sda5 /mnt/sda5 vfat auto,users,exec 0 0
# Dynamic entries below, identified by 'users' option
/dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1 vfat,ext3,ext2,reiserfs noauto,users,exec 0 0
/dev/hda5 /mnt/hda5 vfat,ext3,ext2,reiserfs noauto,users,exec 0 0
/dev/hda6 /mnt/hda6 vfat,ext3,ext2,reiserfs noauto,users,exec 0 0
/dev/hda10 /mnt/hda10 ext3 noauto,users,exec 0 0
/dev/hda11 /mnt/hda11 ext3 noauto,users,exec 0 0
/dev/hda12 /mnt/hda12 ext3 noauto,users,exec 0 0
/dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1 vfat,ext3,ext2,reiserfs noauto,users,exec 0 0
/dev/sda2 /mnt/sda2 vfat,ext3,ext2,reiserfs noauto,users,exec 0 0
/dev/sda6 /mnt/sda6 vfat,ext3,ext2,reiserfs noauto,users,exec 0 0
/dev/sda7 /mnt/sda7 vfat,ext3,ext2,reiserfs noauto,users,exec 0 0
/dev/sda8 /mnt/sda8 ext3 noauto,users,exec 0 0
/dev/sda9 /mnt/sda9 ext3 noauto,users,exec 0 0
/dev/cdrom /media/cdrom iso9660,udf noauto,users,exec,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy vfat,ext2 noauto,users,exec,rw 0 0
Thanks for your help!
Andy
FIXED, but I don't completely understand
Posts: 363
OK, I thought, let's see if I also have this problem using another distribution. So I tried my other favorite, PCLinuxOS.
It worked just fine, not a hitch.
So I took a look at fstab in PCLOS. It looks quite different from Mepis' fstab, though perhaps the differences are not much to someone more conversant with fstab than I am.
I had to change the mount point (PCLOS tries to label vfat partitions as Windows would, so sda5 was mounted on winH, or something like that), but that's all:
/dev/sda5 /mnt/sda5 vfat user,exec,rw,auto,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
So what is the magic option? umask? Anybody know? Back to Google for me, I guess.
Andy
I found a cute solution
Posts: 10
I had the same problem, and I found a solution that works very well! It allows me to easily manage the permissions for my mounted partitions.
fstab
Posts: 4864
Could you post your /etc/fstab file here
so one of us can advise you on what changes to make.