How to access mounted harddrives without being root?

[Sureshot324]

I have all my mp3's on my second hard drive on a ntfs partition. However, when I mount a partition, I can't seem to access it without being root. I would like to be able to add my mp3 folder to my xmms playlist, but this only works if i run xmms as root. Any way around this?

[Chris H]

Does your /etc/fstab have the option of user for the mount point?

[Sureshot324]

My /etc/fstab doesn't have an entry for the second hard drive at all. Currently the second hard drive does not mount automatically at boot. I have to type:

mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt/hdb1

I tried editing the /etc/fstab file by adding the line:

/dev/hdb1 /mnt/hdb1 ntfs user 0 0

but when i rebooted it said "updating /etc/fstab" and the line i adding was gone.

Note: hdb1 is a dynamic disk.

[Sureshot324]

Hmmm, the line i added to /etc/fstab is there again, so maybe i just imagined that it was gone...strange.

Anyway, now when i type 'mount' with no parameters, the following line is in my list of mounted drives:

/dev/hdb1 on /mnt/hdb1 type ntfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)

and, as root, i can access it without having to manually mount it, so i guess it is automatically mounting at boot. However, if i try to access it while not root i get:

[louis@localhost louis]$ cd /mnt/hdb1
bash: cd: /mnt/hdb1: Permission denied

Here is my /etc/fstab:

LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hda5 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/hdb1 /mnt/hdb1 ntfs user 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0

[dan@george]

Maybe try replacing the "user" in

/dev/hdb1 /mnt/hdb1 ntfs user 0 0

with "users". This should give all users in the group "users" the right to unmount the drive, and if they have that then maybe they can access it too... it's worth a try.

[Sureshot324]

Ok the problem has been solved. I needed to add the umask=0000 option in the /etc/fstab entry. The user option only gives users the permission to mount/umount the drive, but doesn't effect the permissions. I think chmod doesn't work because linux doesn't natively support ntfs permissions.

[sarumont]

I think chmod doesn't work because linux doesn't natively support ntfs permissions.

That is correct. And you can add the option 'noauto' in your fstab if you don't want it mounted at boot.