Re: Mounting a partition without root permissions

From: John-Paul Stewart (jpstewart_at_binaryfoundry.ca)
Date: 09/30/05 

Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2005 10:51:09 -0400

Lev Aronsky wrote:
> Hello!
>
> I have a problem, a solution to which I've been looking for a while
> now.
> I have a dual-boot system, with Fedora Core 4 installed on one
> partition, and Windows XP installed on another.
> Among the partitions I have, there's an NTFS partition at /dev/sda4,
> which I would like to mount under Linux. Problem is - I cannot do this
> without root permissions. All the solutions I found all over the
> internet, refer to the file /etc/fstab and suggest to add the 'user'
> option to the device I would like to mount without root access. Now,
> I've done that, and it solves the problem - partially:
> I do get the permission to mount the drive as non-root - but at the
> moment I do that, the mount point's ownership changes to root, and
> everybody else loses the access to the mount point.

Then you need to set one or more of uid, gid, and umask in addition to
the user option is /etc/fstab.

[snip]
> One thing I thought would help is to give my user
> permissions to access the /dev/sda4 device, yet it doesn't help even
> with full permissions on the device.

Changing the permisions on the block device is not a good idea.
Mounting filesystems is something that only root can do (unless fstab
says otherwise) and has nothing to do with permissions on the /dev entry.

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