Mounting CDROM, Floppy, Hard drive

[dolemitecomputer]

I have just installed Red Hat 7.2 and am able to get the floppy drive, cdrom, and hard drive mounted. The problem I have is that the hard drive (windows partition) lets me read from it but I cannot write to it. I have tried every setting in the FSTAB file but I cannot enable the write setting. I might not be getting the right combination of settings. With the floppy and cdrom they show up as mounted but it does not recognize a disc in either. Any setting I change it to I get "block device not valid" errors when booting. Any suggestions?

[XWRed1]

What filesystem is on the Windows partition? Fat32? NTFS?

If its NTFS, then your distro probably won't let you write to it by default, because writing to NTFS filesystems is still considered experimental and dangerous.

Fat32 should work fine, right out of the chute.

[dolemitecomputer]

It is using FAT32. I just reinstalled Red Hat last night and right from the install the other partition is not mounted. I did edit the FSTAB file and set it up using the default setting but that did not work.

[XWRed1]

What does it say when you try writing to it? Permission denied?

[dolemitecomputer]

Yes it does.

[XWRed1]

And are you trying this as root, or as a user?

[dolemitecomputer]

I can read and write to all drives fine as root user but as a regular user I get the permission denied error. I don't mind but it is just kind of a hassle to login as root everytime I want to copy something to the drives.

[XWRed1]

Ok, I know how to fix that. You need to mount the partition with special options.

You need to mount it as:

mount -t vfat /dev/some_partition -o umask=777 /my_mount_point


that should do it. The umask option should fake the file permissions of everything on the partition to be accessible by everyone.

Of course, it could very well not work, so come back here and let us know what happens.

[adamjaskie]

just one thing: if the computer is connected to the internet, DO NOT DO THAT!!! if ANYONE gets access to your computer, they can delete all your windows stuff. Instead, create a new user group, and give that group read/write permission for that hard drive. Then, add your user to that group.