/dev/sda1 Permissions?

Greetings. I'm new, both to the forums, and to Linux itself.

I'm having trouble getting an external USB drive working correctly. Any user can mount it, but I can't figure out how to make the contents accessible to any user. Chmod won't change the directory permissions, and I can't find anything in the man pages, info pages, or the SuSE help-center that partains to this problem.

If it's of any relavence, I'm on SuSE 8.2 (haven't gotten around to upgrading to 9.1) and the external drive is actually an internal 40GB drive in a drive converter case, and the drive is formatted as NTFS.

Thanks for any help you guys can give me.
Pi Man.

Are you trying to read or write to the drive?

Hopefully both. And, I'd like to make it automatically grant these permissions to all users every time it's mounted.

Thanks.

First problem is that NTFS is readable only. That said, you can recompile the kernel to be able to write to NTFS but it is very experimental. Also, I am not sure that the older kernels from 8.2 will have that option unless you upgrade the kernel. You should probably be able to read the disk though. Are you having problems reading it?

I can read the disk as the root, but I can't read it as a normal user.

And, if I can't write to the external hard drive, It's no big deal.

Originally posted by Pi Man@Sep 6 2004, 22:08

I can read the disk as the root, but I can't read it as a normal user.

I think the easiest thing to do is to use fat32 instead of ntsf, but if the situation calls for ntfs, the next easiest thing to do is set permisions in /etc/fstab

From man mount:

uid=value, gid=value and umask=value
 * * * * * * *Set the file permission *on *the *filesystem. * The
 * * * * * * *umask *value *is *given *in octal. *By default, the
 * * * * * * *files are owned by root and not readable *by *some*
 * * * * * * *body else.

so your fstab entry might look something like this:

/dev/hdb1 * */mnt/drive2 * * ntfs * uid=1000,gid=100 *

That will set the permsions for one regular user to access the drive hdb1 which will be mounted under /mnt/drive2 (assuming you have an hdb1 and have created the directory /mnt/drive2 ). You can get the numbers for uid and gid from doing [CODE]cat /etc/passwd[quote]. When you cat the passwd file it will show user names followed by uid and gid numbers. When I played around with this I skipped the umask value, and I didn't have any problems.

Thank you! It finally worked.

I'm alright with this configuration, but is it possible to allow all regular users to access this drive?