mounting usb drive as normal user!?

kdouglas

hi,
i'm having a problem with my usb drive, i can mount it no problem, but only if i su to root, but even then i can only browse the drive from a terminal as root. i've tried looking through the man pages for mount and specifying the mount point for all users but when i use my normal user account i cant access the drive, i've also tried mounting as a normal user but even when i changed the permissions of the mount command i still get told you must be superuser to use mount. i dont mind having to su to mount the drive but i would like to be able to browse the drive in KDE under my normal user name.

also, when i specify the mount point in fstab, it does not mount on startup, the mount point is there but nothing is mounted
i'm using mandrakelinux 10.1 with KDE

anyone any ideas?
thanks

Fenster

You need to edit /etc/fstab to grant user permissions. Mine is as follows:

/dev/sda1               /mnt/flash              vfat    pamconsole,noatime,sync,exec,noauto,managed 0 0

I can mount it as a regular user.

Syth

Mine is as follows:

/dev/usb-stick        /mnt/usb        auto        noauto,owner,rw,user 0 0

I think the important thing is 'user'.

man fstab and man mount are our friends.

pickarooney

Hmm, Mandrake 10.1 should automatically supermount the USB drive to /mnt/removable.

Fenster

pickarooney wrote:

Hmm, Mandrake 10.1 should automatically supermount the USB drive to /mnt/removable.

I had weird problems with Mandrake applying odd permissions to everything (such as having to be root to get DNS access on the net), so who knows.

nadir

i use umask=775
or such

kdouglas

This my line from fstab:

/dev/sda1 /mnt/usbdrive vfat rw,noauto,user

when i first installed mandrake it did try to mount to /mnt/removable but that didnt work.

have tried everything i can think of and see in the fstab and mount man pages but to no avail.

even if i mount the drive under su and then try to change the permissions or owner on it, i get an error saying 'read-only file system'

tried putting in the umask aswell and still nothing.

thanks for your help guys but im still stuck?

nadir

like this
/dev/sda1 /mnt/storage-device auto rw,user,umask=777 0 0


note: thats all readable and writable, but it will work
change the permissions if you want more security

Syth

kdouglas wrote:

This my line from fstab:

/dev/sda1 /mnt/usbdrive vfat rw,noauto,user

when i first installed mandrake it did try to mount to /mnt/removable but that didnt work.

have tried everything i can think of and see in the fstab and mount man pages but to no avail.

even if i mount the drive under su and then try to change the permissions or owner on it, i get an error saying 'read-only file system'

tried putting in the umask aswell and still nothing.

thanks for your help guys but im still stuck?

Shouldn't there be some zeros at the end of that line?

Your best bet would be to copy a line for the CD or floppy drive and change device and mount point.

kdouglas

like this
/dev/sda1 /mnt/storage-device auto rw,user,umask=777 0 0


note: thats all readable and writable, but it will work
change the permissions if you want more security

tried that and still not working for me, this really is a strange / slightly annoying one, is it possible to remove/reinstall the mount binaries? would this even be a possible solution?

Syth

A thought: Is the partitioning OK on it? WHen I got my USB stick the partition table was fecked 6 ways from sunday. What do you type in as root to mount it? Does it work if you type in `mount /sbdrive` (as root)? (If you then your /etc/fstab file is OK, it's just a permissions problem. If this doesn't work, then your /etc/fstab file is incorrect)

To check for the partitions type `fdisk -l /dev/sda`, If everything looks to hell and you get warnings, then the partitions are messed up.

kdouglas

havent checked, will do when i get home (in work right now) have been using the drive for a while and never had any problem with it but ya never know!

thanks

pickarooney

FWIW, when I plugin in my USB-key and type mount, it reads as follows:

none on /mnt/removable type supermount (rw,dev=/dev/scsi/host2/bus0/target0/lun0/part1,fs=ext2:vfat,--,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850)