Permissions and mounted drives

[Neil Goodman]

Hello,

I just recently set up my laptop to dual-boot Windows and Linux. I have one ext3 partition setup with Kubuntu 6.10 and an NTFS partition with Windows on the same hard drive. I did some research and learned how to use the /etc/fstab file to get the NTFS partition to automount on startup. I followed the directions I found and entered this entry into my fstab file:

/dev/sda2 /media/win ntfs ro,nouser,exec 0 0

I then made a directory in my "/media" directory named "win" with sudo mkdir. After restarting my computer everything mounted correctly. However, every time I tried to enter the "/media/win" directory, KDE would give me a pop-up window saying that I did not have permission to access: "file:///media/win". Eventually I used the "Filesystem and Devices" program in System Settings to give my user account permission to access the NTFS partition. Everything now works fine. However, that was kind of a "stab-in-the-dark" process for me and I don't fully understand why it worked.

So, my question is, what controls the permissions of mounted devices? Do the permissions of the mount-point directory determine anything? Or is there some separate file that keeps track of the mounted device's permissions? I've tried to find this information on my own, but I've had no luck. If anyone could help me understand this, I would be very grateful.

[devils casper]

hi Neil Goodman,

Welcome to the LinuxForums.

umask sets the permissions for mounted NTFS and FAT32 partitions. by default, it provides read and write (depends on FileSystem) access to 'root' user only. set its value to zero to enable read/write access for normal users.

/dev/sda2 /media/win ntfs defaults,umask=0 0 0

Casper

[Neil Goodman]

Thanks for the quick response!