hey everyone. i was wondering how i can specify only root to mount a drive. drives including cdroms, floppys, and other harddrives. I have read abotu fstab in other posts around the internet, but never got a clear answer. I would perfer NOT to have these drives mount on bootup. how at the command line could i mount the drive as root, but have other users get a lack of permissions error. is this possible? i imagin it is. well thanks again everyone. without this forum, i might be stuck using windows...

In /mnt/hda1 (example) right click on folder and set permissions from root to root as only user. Change etc/fstab to noauto from auto. (noauto,user,rw 0 0) should do it.

Hey, thanks for getting back to me. I was wondering though, even if I change the privalges on the common mount point in /mnt, couldn't I with the mount command specify another mount point where I had rwx privlages: #mount /dev/floppy /any/where/else Or am i wrong and this is where /etc/fstab comes ino by allowing only the specified user the specified privlages? Maybe you can't even mount past /mnt. Thanks again, these where just questions in my head when I read the reply before I got a chance to try it myself. Take care.

You need to remove the "user" tags from the lines in /etc/fstab to stop ordinary users mounting drives.