vfat as /home (problems with permissions)

[Jusuf]

Hi folks,

I have a dual boot system ubuntu-XP with a vfat for my data.
How do i mount correctly the vfat as /home?
There are several Threads concerned with mounting vfat (also on ubuntuforus.org http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthre...t+permissions), but none about mounting a vfat as /home

I've already tried several things in /etc/fstab, for example:

/dev/hda7 /home vfat rw,umask=0,nosuid,nodev,users 0 0
or just
/dev/hda7 /home vfat umask=000 0 0


well, what does "umask=000" actually mean?

With this /home i get two error messages:
(more or less)
1.
"$home/.dmrc has wrong permissions, they should be 644, owner should be user"

2.
then, the system cannot set the mode 0700 of the ~/.gnome2_private/

with a failsafe terminal i get only the first error message, i can login and i can see the vfat.
nice.

But i cannot change the permissions neiter for ~/.dmrc nor for any other file on the vfat.

Which options do i have to set in /etc/fstab ?

Are the permissions of the files, copied from my previous /home, important or are they overridden by some global permission for the partition?

I've been searching in forums and tried for a long time...
would be glad for any help

thanx, Jusuf

[lestoil]

try help.ubuntu.com/starterguide. That issue is covered there.

[sdousley]

FAT as a /home partition is effectively useless unless taken care of properly, since FAT doesn't actually allow permissions to be put on files. Ideally you would use a Linux based file system, if it's more for sharing files between my documents on windows and linux, u could do as i do, have a seperate partition for my my documents (G on my computer) And then i mount that as /mnt/win/g, but you could do something like /home/my_documents that would probably be better than having a FAT32 /home partition.