Mounting a shared disk

This has probably been written elsewhere -- and better. Still, I have to write this down so that later on, I could use this for reference. Besides, this works FOR me.

Linux can read (and write to, given the proper permissions) to native Windows partitions. Well, VFAT at least. NTFS read-write is in alpha, I think. I have installed a patch to read my NTFS partition in FC1, but I'm more prudent regarding the write stuff. There is also a big issue of why Red Hat -- and consequently, their community project Fedora Core -- doesn't support NTFS natively. But that's another story.

My box, for example, has two harddisks: a Seagate 40GB and a Maxtor 2GB (it's an old one from way back 1997, still usable though). The Seagate is partitioned into one big wallop of WinXP NTFS occupying 30GB, and Linux partitions sharing the rest of the meager 10GB. Linux doesn't complain for the allocation. In fact, it could do with about half of that. Try that with Windows. (On a side note: I keep saying "Try this, try that, with Windows" just to illustrate the glaring and obvious limitations of that OS line.)

The Maxtor is FAT32 containing files that I share between my two OS. My /etc/fstab entries for this is:

/dev/hdb1 /mnt/win_fat32 vfat defaults 0 0

Problem is, the /mnt/win_fat32 is mounted as root, so unless I sudo all my writes to that mount, I can only read it. Bad, since I also place the shared Thunderbird Mail directory there. (See previous post.)

So I rethought my strategy:

1. Unmount the FAT32 partition.


2. Create a new directory under mnt.
   
   # mkdir /mnt/win_fat32
   
   # chown -R iandexter:users /mnt/win_fat32
   
   What I did after creating the directory was change its ownership to mine so that I have read-write permissions to it.


3. Edit /etc/fstab.
   
   # vi /etc/fstab
   
   /dev/hdb1 /mnt/win_fat32 vfat rw,noauto 0 0
   
   I changed the options so that the FAT32 partition is not mounted at startup but with read-write permissions.


4. Add a command to mount FAT32 when I log in.
   
   $ vi ~/.bash_profile
   
   mount /mnt/win_fat32
   
   YMMV: for Red Hat and Fedora, bash looks at .profile, .bash_profile, .bash_login, and .login consecutively at login. RTFM.


5. Add a command to unmount FAT32 when I log off.
   
   $ vi ~/.bash_logout
   
   umount /mnt/win_fat32
   
   Again, YMMV, RTFM.

To test this, try logging in, write to /mnt/win_fat32, log out, log in as another user to see if the mount was cleanly unmounted.