permission denied with and USB hard drive

[dasch]

Hi,

I'm working on this problem since one week now and this is driving me crazy :/

So, I've finally decided to cry for help

Here is the problem:

I have an USB external drive of 250 Gb. There are 2 NTFS partitions on it. When I plug the USB in, Mandriva (2005 LE) recognizes it and automount it automatically .

However when I try to access it (as a regular user) it says : permission denied. But I can access it without any problem when I'm root.

Here is the content of my /etc/fstab (generated automatically by Mandriva):

[...]
/dev/sdb1               /mnt/removable          ntfs    pamconsole,exec,noauto,utf8,iocharset=iso8859-1,managed 0 0
/dev/sdb2               /mnt/removable1         ntfs    pamconsole,exec,noauto,utf8,iocharset=iso8859-1,managed 0 0
[...]

I know that I normally should modify the /etc/fstab file to allow regular users to access the drive (adding 'user' on the preceding lines). However that won't work (as a matter of fact I tried several times ) because this file is modified automatically by Mandriva.

Here are the many things I tried without any luck

1. adding the 'user' param to the file /etc/fstab and then "freeze" it so that no one can modify it (using "chattr +i /etc/fstab" when being root).
That didn't work because at the next reboot, Mandriva don't automount the drive then. And as a side effect, I couldn't use my other usb keys when I did that.

2. changing the parameters of the drive using HardDrake. This one work temporarily but again at the next reboot Mandriva don't seem to remember the parameters and I have to do that each time.

3. I tried several other things (to long to mention it) and always without any success.

So, any help would be GREATLY accepted as I'm feeling a little depressed right now :'(

Thanks in advance,
dasch

[hiflyr91]

Having similar problems myself. My Mandriva won't even mount the drive though. So, you're one up on me.

[milmot]

The culprit is HAL which mounts automatically your USB drive as a NTFS disk with no permission at all except for root.

To prevent that, you need to add this file in
/usr/share/hal/fdi/95userpolicy
------------------- cut here ----------------------------
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

<deviceinfo version="0.2">
<device>

<match key="volume.fstype" string="ntfs">
<merge key="volume.policy.mount_option.umask=0" type="bool">true</merge>
</match>

</device>
</deviceinfo>
-------------------- cut here ---------------------

You can name this file whatever name suits your taste (I chose ntfs.fdi).

This rule makes a NTFS partition to be mounted with all access rights to everybody. But as HAL adds the option "-ro" too, you can't write to your disk which is preferable as writing in NTFS partition from Linux is not well tested yet.

Hope this helps.

[EDIT] For Hal to take into account your added file, you need to reboot or execute:
sudo /etc/init.d/haldaemon restart

[bigtomrodney]

If you get it working with that HAL policy just remember Mandriva does not write to NTFS at all - even if you can turn it on I would not recommend it. If you can best thing to do is format it as FAT32, then it can be shared between Windows and Linux.