I have seen several postings in the past requesting information on how to fix the configuration files to allow a regular user to read and write to windows drives without needing to login as a superuser. I recently figured out how to fix this problem in SuSE and I have not seen any followups by others so I hope this helps others having trouble reading and writing to Windows FAT(32) drives from Linux SuSE 9.0. To give a regular user access to reading and writing to windows drives make the following changes to your fstab, mtab, and permissions config files. These are found in the /etc directory. 1. file:/etc/fstab For instance, if you have /dev/hda1 /windows/C vfat defaults 0 0 simply replace the word "defaults" with "user,noauto" to now read /dev/hda1 /windows/C vfat user,noauto 0 0 2. file:/etc/mtab If you have /dev/hda1 /windows/C vfat rw 0 0 replace the rw with rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,user=xx where xx=this is your logon userid. In my case, I have /dev/hda1 /windows/C vfat rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,user=ed 0 0 My user ID is ed so you will need to set this to your USERID. 3. file:/etc/permissions delete the /windows root.root 775 line The permissions will be set on your user desktop when you make an ICON for the individual windows drives. Right click on the drive icons and select properties. The permissions will be controlled from here rather than the config file listed in the / etc directory. Hope this clarifies matters. Ed

I personally find it much easier to just add umask=0 to /etc/fstab which allows all users to write to the drive.