My first Linux Install

[Webdiggity]

Ok,

Last night I repartitioned some free space on my gaming rig to install Redhat 9. I have a question though. I'll detail how I have my partitions set up and then my question.

I created an 8gb partition to hold my swap drive and root partition. I then installed Redhat 9 and booted it and got it running.

I then booted windows and created a 10gb Fat32 partition. Back to Linux.

I booted Linux again and created a dir called fatdrive in my /home directory.

I then opened a terminal and ran # mount -t vfat /dev/hda6 /home/fatdrive. Hda6 is my Fat32 partition.

This allowed me to see the partition but I could not write to the directory.

I did some searching around the web for the line I need to add to fstab but nothing I used would work. I could get it to automagically mount the drive but with no write permissions for a user. It seems every place I found something the line was a little different. I can't remember exactly what I added to fstab but it was something like this.


/dev/hda6 /mnt/fatdrive vfat auto,defaults, unmask=000 0 0


What am I doing wrong? I would like for the partition to be mounted at boot and all accounts to be able to read and write to it. I like to try and figure things out on my own but I'm stuck at this point and looking for help.

Thanks in advance,
Webdiggity

P.S. I love Linux. Wish I had started playing with it years ago. I can't believe an OS and apps this good could be free!

[Linux Frank]

Can't help, I don't own a copy of the particular OS you are trying to mount, and so have never needed to do a mount that way (also I'm still trying to find time to learn this stuff myself).

Have you checked

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man mount

It should also direct you to some useful other places of explanation.

You may need to give the mnt directory permissons, not something I know alot about at the moment.

However

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man chmod

might start you in the right direction.

[Void Main]

Did you remount the partition after making the change? It won't take effect until you do:

After addin the appropriate line to /etc/fstab you should:

# umount /home/fatdrive
# mount /home/fatdrive

The "umask=000" option should have worked. Take a look at the mount options for fat in the man page:
http://voidmain.is-a-geek.net/man?parm= ... ocType=man

I also set the userid/groupid (uid=501,gid=501) where your userid (not username) is 501 and your groupid is 501 (see /etc/passwd and /etc/group). It will then appear that you own all files and directories under your /home/fatdrive when mounted. So your fstab entry might look something like this:

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/dev/hda6              /home/fatdrive              vfat   uid=501,gid=501,umask=000   0 0


The above would set ownership to you (assuming you are user 501) and it would give rwxrwxrwx on files/directories (wide open access). Again the "/home/fatdrive" directory must exist before trying to mount the drive and then use "mount /home/fatdrive" after entering the above (unmount it first if it is already mounted with "umount /home/fatdrive". It should mount automatically with the above permissions at boot time from then on.