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Hello, A few months back I installed Suse 9.3 on a partition on my second harddrive and after a week of playing around with it I got bored and haven't ...
  1. 10-26-2006 #1
    titus82
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    Question How do you change the write permissions of fstab?

    Hello,

    A few months back I installed Suse 9.3 on a partition on my second harddrive and after a week of playing around with it I got bored and haven't touched it since. Then two days ago I managed to royally screw up Windows XP by deleting something in the registry, now it hangs at the blue screen where it once allowed me to select the user to sign in under. I tried a repair install and, well, here I am in Linux writing this.

    So the point of all of this is that I've been trying to move some of my data from the windows partition of the main HD onto a Fat32 partition I setup on my second HD so that I might transfer this data back to the main HD after a fresh install of Windows. Now I've looked around these forums quite a bit and discovered that I didn't have my Fat32 partition mounted so I did that in the shell. But I still haven't been able to change the partitions write permission, so I can read whatever is on the partition (nothing) but cannot write anything to it. I continued searching the forums and found what I believe to be the answer; I need to edit the fstab file in ect folder... except I can't because I don't have write permissions on that file.

    Help me Linuxforums, you're my only hope... Because the guy who convinced me to install Linux in the first place is now in Ireland and out of contact for awhile.

    Thanks for any help you can offer!
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  2. 10-26-2006 #2
    bryansmith
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    The fstab is only writeable by root or someone with root privileges. You have to enter su at a terminal, enter your root password and voila, you have root privileges. From here, type 'nano /etc/fstab'. This will open a basic editor by which you can edit your fstab.

    Bryan
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  3. 10-26-2006 #3
    unchiujar
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    superuser to edit fstab

    You need to be root to be able to edit the fstab file. It's a system file so you need higher level of access for it ( unlike Win and the registry ).
    Login as root and try to edit it.
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  4. 10-26-2006 #4
    titus82
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    Haha, I love you guys. Thank you, it worked and now I can start to transfer stuff over... Maybe this Linux thing is all that its cracked up to be
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