mount perimissions on external HD

[sirka]

i've read so many threads and pages regarding this problem, I dont even know if I've having the same issue as when I started. But I am going to start over from the beginning and ask for help this time.

I have a debian machine with an external harddrive. I have a windows machine on the same network from which I can read the files from the debian drive, but I cant write to it.
At some point in time (several months ago?) I could.

currently, I have this line in my /etc/fstab:
/dev/sdb1 /media/MUSIC/ vfat user,uid=1000,gid=1000,rw,umask=000 0 0

and i've tried a hundred different mount commands (but not as many as i've tried fstab lines) but generally have been using this at start up:
sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /media/MUSIC/
(i am under the impression that i should not have to use 'sudo' when doing this, since the fstab line includes 'user' but if i dont, the command fails)

no matter what I've tried, the permissions come out as owned by root:
drwxr-xr-x 905 root root 163840 2010-10-17 17:45 Music

attempting (as root) to change ownership of the directory also does not work:
chown: changing ownership of `/media/MUSIC/': Operation not permitted
(because its a FAT file system, i think)

i've confirmed that i have the uid and gid number correct with
id sirka


Could someone please help me?

Thank you very much for your time

[barriehie]

Have you tried changing the directory permissions before mounting the drive?

[sirka]

i did and it produced what seemed like weird results to me.
after rebooting, i switched to root user and did:
chown sirka /media/MUSIC

then i did
ls -l /media

and it showed sirka has the group and owner.
then i exited back to regular user sirka and mounted the drive (it failed and tried again using sudo, and it worked).
then i immediately did ls -l /media again
and the owner and group was root.

i guess this has something to with the drive being vfat? but really i am in no place to making guesses at this point.

ETA:
i just repeated that process, except for the rebooting.
i changed to root, umounted the drive, changed the permissions of the folder, checked with ls, changed to a normal user, attempted to mount the drive... and it worked. a regular user can now mount the drive.
but then i did 'ls -l /media' and it is owned by root. i also tried to copy a file to the drive from a windows7 machine and still got a permissions error.

[barriehie]

Have you checked the drive for errors?