I just created a new partition on my hard drive to store audio files. I entered it into the /etc/fstab file and can cd to the partition, but I can not mkdir on it as a user only root can. To allow anyone to rw to the partition what permissions do I need to set?
Please provide the appropriate entry you added to your /etc/fstab.
Also please provide permissions of the mount directory you created. For example, if you created a directory “D” under /windows, what is the output of “dir /windows”
What openSUSE version are you using?
I got it working by changing the group on the mount point from root to users but is that the correct way of doing it? Second question is, Is /mnt/av the normal place for putting this mount point?
Here is the info
fstab
/dev/sda11 /mnt/av ext3 acl,user_xattr 1 2
ls -al of the mount point /mnt/av
drwxrwx— 4 root users 4096 2009-08-18 17:29 av
I am using SUSE 11.1 with KDE 3.5
If it were me, I would change the permissions to drwxrwxrwx unless you were looking to restrict access to a specifc group of users. If only one user (say user “oldcpu” ) was going to access, I might even change the ownership from root to oldcpu. But that ties in to the second question …
I find the choice of the location like the pronunciation of tomatoes and tomatoes …
If I will be putting data on the partition, I prefer to put the partition (if a Linux partition) under /home. If the partition is data for only a specific user (such as user “oldcpu”) I prefer to put the partition under /home/oldcpu/data
If the partition is a Windoze format, I tend to put the partition under /windows/D or something like that.
But having typed that, I know some users feel very strongly with a different view, … so much so they would put the boxing gloves on and invite me into a ring to resolve what they believe should be enforced as a better location. 
Was there a specific reason why you mounted as /dev/sda11 instead of using the drive ID ? I believe with the new libata scheme of things, it is often preferable to use the drive ID
Yes, changing the group to users is fine. Make sure you remove world write access. Probably mode 775 (rwxrwx-rx) is appropriate. Maybe even 2775 (rwxrwsr-x) to make sure that subdirectories inherit the group (but your users will already have a primary group of users so this is redundant). If you want to restrict users to their own areas, you might even want to create subdirectories for each user and give them ownership of their own directories.
I would avoid /mnt though, as /mnt itself tends to be used for system things. You can name your own mountpoint, say /data or /av, or use some of oldcpu’s suggestions, like /home/av.
That should read /home/data
I saw ‘/dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD2500YS-18SHB2_WD-WCANY3858964-part5’ notation and other retries like this in /etc/fstab and have never read/saw it before. So I just inserted what most of the book showed. When I have time I’ll lookup the libata scheme and see what its all about.
Good suggest about haveing the mount point in home/data
Thank you
There is a thread here (in a different context) where the “by-id” was discussed.
Why is menu.lst given the ID of the hard drive? - openSUSE Forums
To quote mingus725:
There is some neat information in that thread.