only root-access to mounted drives

**nightfrost** · 08-12-2004, 02:23 PM

Hi!

I have a question which seems to me to be very simple to answer. I've spent the last hours looking in this forum, as well as kanotix.com, and linuxquestions.org- and I almost feel stupid for not having found any answer to it.

OK, I plug in a USB-devices (I'm using a SD-card & a USB-harddrive). Then, as root, I write

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1

the drive gets mounted. Which I find surprising since it is not defined in fstab - it's nice, but I don't understand how it works (an explanation would be very much appreciated for the learning newbie

The problem is that only root has access to the mounted drives. I don't know how to change this, especially since the device is not defined in fstab. Please help. Thanks in advance.

**baldyeti** · 08-12-2004, 03:40 PM

The device is probably probed, and vfat identified as filesystem; try the '-o umask=000' option in your mount command. Or add the following entry in /etc/fstab: "/dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1 vfat users,umask=000 0 0"

**nightfrost** · 08-14-2004, 12:22 PM

many thanks!

Of all the answers I've gotten on this and similar issues across different forums, this is the one tha helped; umask=000!

I'm trying to figure out another thing now, namely how to get an icon pop up automatically on the desktop when a device is inserted. This should be possible as it happens when running from the liveCD. However, information on how to get a HD-install behave that way seems very hard to find. Any suggestions?

Thanks again

**Durand Hicks** · 08-14-2004, 08:07 PM

As root in a console, run this:

Code:

mkdesktophdicons

This is a knoppix specific package that isn't in Debian proper, but it will create the icons on your user(s) desktop except root based on what was entered in /etc/fstab. If /etc/fstab doesn't have an entry for all of your mountpoints, then it won't create any icons for what isn't in there.

HTH,

Durand