Mounting Hard Drives as user

OpenSuse 11.2 64bit

When I select a hard drive in Dolphin file manager it asks for the root password. I would like to gain easier access to the drives. The Yast Partition Manager lists all of the drives and has a dialog box to change this i.e. user can mount the drive. Can we change this feature on the run, while the system is running ?

The Fstab file is not listing all of the drives, so I cannot just edit the config here.

As far as I know, you must mount drives as root for any location except in your own home area. However, did you know that you can use the Partitioner to create new entries in your fstab file for you. Take any partition that is not yet mounted and does not exist in your fstab file and use the Partitioner to add it to fstab to be mounted automatically each time you restart openSUSE. Do not put a hard drive partition in your fstab that you plan on unplugging on the fly, such as external USB hard drives. Now you can add external USB hard drives to your fstab file, but just don’t plan on unplugging them while openSUSE is running.

To add a partition that is not presently mounted but does work in the Partitioner, run Yast / System / Partitioner. Answer Yes to the warning message and then in the main program on the left, find your partition you want to mount. All partitions will end with a number like 1 or 2 or 3 and so forth. Hard drives are represented as sda or sdb or sdc. You are trying to mount an existing partition so find the correct one in the list, right click over it and pick EDIT. In the partition edit menu, select the Mount Partition Bullet and then in the Mount Point box type in the folder you want it mounted to such as /Windows/C or /Windows/D or /Software or what ever folder you want to mount it to. If the folder does not exist, it will be created for you. Press Finish and then Finish again. If everything is good, an entry will be made for you in your fstab file and the partition will be mounted at once and each time you restart your computer.

Thank You,

The general idea in Unix/Linux is that disk partitions are mounted on boot on the place the system administrator decided that they should be. End-users have nothing to do with this. For the end-user the partitions are simply there and the directory trees offered by the file systems on them are part of the one big directory tree that starts at the root with /. Thus the end-user is normaly complelety unaware of the existence of partitions.

To achieve this mounting on boot, they are to be configured in /etc/fstab. Thus either edit that file by yourself (as root of course) or use YaST > System > Partitioner. In the last case, the only thing to do is edit the partition that is shown in the GUI and give it a mount point. YaST will even create that mount point for you if it does not exist. The only thing to take care of is that you check if the the Format checkbox is off, else you will overwrite everything on the partition.

Thanks, food for thought. When in Yast > Partitioner, setting a partition to ‘mount as user’ was not persistent. It was gone when reopening the edit box. I will attempt to get these partitions into Fstab (they are not part of the root fs) and use mounting options something like ‘noauto, user’ and see how that goes.

I do not quite understand why you want these partitions “mounted by the user”. Aren’t they allways there, are they removable?. When they are fixed in the system (I mean not fixed as can not be removed by opening the box or the like, but fixed in the sense that they are allways connected, even if they are in a separate box connecting through some cable) just put them in fstab and let them be mounted at boot like / and /home (if you have a seperate /home) or any other “allways must be there” partition.

Did you read: SDB:Basics of partitions, filesystems, mount points - openSUSE or do you have that knowledge allready? I ask becausr you saying “(they are not part of the root fs)” let me doubt you do understand, but it could be only a less precise way of expressing yourself.