fstab help

[crito]

I'm a relative newbie, so bear with me...
I have Windows installed on my notebook, with Debian installed on an external hard drive. I also have on the external drive an NTFS partition for my multimedia. When Debian boots it places an icon for the multimedia partition on the desktop but I was denied access. So I used NTFS-3g to access the NTFS files. That worked out fine.
My plan was to stop the Desktop icon from appearing on start-up and replacing it with a link to /mnt/windows on my Desktop to access the multimedia files. So (not really knowing what I was doing) I went to fstab and deleted

/dev/sdb5 /media/usb1 auto rw,user,noauto 0 0

So that didn't work out as I had intended, the original Desktop icon is still there, only now when I click it I have full access to all of my multimedia files. No more permissions issues.

It all worked out well, I'm just wondering what I did, and if there are any unseen negative issues with leaving it as is...

[Jonathan183]

We probably need to see the contents of /etc/fstab and /etc/mtab to understand what causes mounting of the disk.
My understanding of the ntfs-3g driver is at present ... the control over read/write access for the ntfs partition using umask, fmask and dmask values. My understanding is that typical access is either root only with write access or everyone has full read/write access. Since I have only used read/write for partitions with data only & 2 trusted users this has not caused me an issue -so I have not experimented with settings.
You can find more info on this using man ntfs-3g or by reference to the ntfs-3g website.

[crito]

After I posted this I got to thinking that leaving it as is would probably be OK for reading, but writing without nfts-3g might cause problems. So I edited fsab to not mount the NTFS volume on startup and created a symbolic link to /etc/windows on my Desktop.

thanks...