editing fstab file ??

[James Wilkinson]

spamse wrote:
> Also, I added a line to /etc/fstab to mount the drive, as I wanted it
> to mount automatically on boot, but this line does not seem to get
> executed (I was following instructions from a Red Hat site). Is this
> the right place to be putting the mount statement?

(I don't think anyone's addressed this yet...)

The fstab file doesn't work like that.

It's not an executable file containing statements to be run. It's a list
of filesystems and the options they need to be automatically loaded (or
not). So you *can't* put a straight "mount" command into fstab.

A typical fstab line might be
/dev/hda11 /media/data  vfat defaults 0 0
to mount the device hda11 on /media/data as a vfat (long filename
DOS-compatible) filesystem. The 0's tell mount that it shouldn't be
checked before booting, nor dumped to tape when backing up. (Both are
good options for vfat: you could experiment with "0 2" if you have
dosfstools installed).

If you want to be able to write to the partition as a normal user, then
you can do something like this:
/dev/hda11 /media/data  vfat defaults,dmask=0,fmask=111 0 0

Hope this clarifies things,

James.

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