Mounting Windows Drive In Linux

[hardwarejunkie]

I am running gentoo linux. I have 2 hard drives on my system. Master is 60GB for gentoo and slave is 80GB for WinXP PRO. I have dual booting working wonderfully with the grub bootloader. My problem is when I mount my windows drive in linux I can't accesss it with a normal user. I have to be root. I mount the drive with the following command. as root "mount /dev/hdb1 /windows". I have changed the permissions on the directory of /windows to my user, but when I mount the drive it becomes root permission only again. Is their any easy solution to this problem?

 

-Zac

[Jezza]

Can't you tell it to mount your windows drive on startup? That's what my madrake box does. It's mounted for me during the startup bit.

[hardwarejunkie]

I know it has to do with the file /etc/fstab in most distrobutions of linux.

Gentoo has to be edited by hand. It does very little configuring on its own.

 

Sound-mind from EOCF

 

You have to add a few options in the /etc/fstab to get this working properly. You could also pass the options to mount by using the -o flag but editing fstab makes more sense for a permanent solution.

 

You probably need to add a gid or uid flag to tell it which group the drive should be mounted as and also specify a umask. The umask can be slightly confusing at first. It's the file permissions you want the directory to have, only inverted. So if you want full rwx permissions for yourself and your group (assuming you set gid/uid correctly) and everyone else to only have rx you would have a umask of 002.

 

The umask is kinda of strange when you first use it but you'll get used to it. Come up with your permissions such as 755 and then subtract that from 777. So the umask that will result in mode 755 is 022. Remember: read=4, write=2, execute=1 for usergroupeveryone.

 

Here is my fat32 partition's fstab entry at work:

Code:

 

/dev/hdb1 /MSEData vfat gid=100,umask=002 1 0