sreynolds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote: >Yesterday I installed Fedora on a stand-alone machine at >home. > >Q1) When I mount my USB flash drive I can only write to the >drive as root. I logged in as root and tried to change >permissions for all users to RWE (777?), but I get a message >that says that I don't have permission to change permissions >on the flash drive. I thought root was god, so my wild guess >is that there is something wrong with my entry for sda1 in >fstab: > >/dev/sda1 /mnt/removable auto auto,user,rw 0 0 > >Is there something wrong with this entry? > The entry looks fine, what are the permissions on the dir that it is being mounted on, and who owns it? Actually, I don't think the ownership or mode of the mount point has anything to do with it; we routinely set up mount points and protect them 000, so that it is very obvious when something is mounted there. The thing you are missing is the setting of the ownership and mode in the fstab entry or on the mount command. After the auto,user,rw, add uid=500 (or whatever the uid you wish to own the files is). Also, if you'd like the drive accessible to everyone on your system, add umask=000. umask is a "backward" switch to me: It gives the mode bits you wish to not be set, so 000 ends up being a mode of 777 for a Windows file system. The reason these are needed is that the Windows file systems do not include the concept of ownership or protection. Why should they? A Windows computer only has one user, right? So to map this crippled file system into Linux, the mount must assign some pattern of ownership and protection. The default is root, and probably 755, which would mean that you could read the drive, but not write to it, other than from root. Hope this helps. Sorry about the printer. ---- Robert P. Nix internet: nix.robert@xxxxxxxx Mayo Clinic phone: 507-284-0844 RO-CE-8-857 page: 507-270-1182 200 First St. SW Rochester, MN 55905 ---- "Codito, Ergo Sum" "In theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice, theory and practice are different."
