hal and usb problem

[Gerhard Magnus]

I've recently added a portable usb hard drive to my FC4 system.  It
seems FC4 uses a program called HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) that
automatically resets and updates the fstab with mount information about
peripherals -- sort of like plug and play.  I ran into all sorts of
conflicts by trying to add mount information for this usb drive to fstab
manually.

So anyway, I now have the drive plugged in and nothing added to the
fstab file.  HAL adds this line to fstab

/dev/sdb1 /media/usbdisk vfat
pamconsole,exec,noauto,fscontext=system_u:object_r:removable_t,utf8,managed 0 0

and mounts the device.  I get an icon for it on my KDE desktop.  But now
when I try to remove a file from this usb drive (as a regular user or as
superuser) I get the message:

rm: cannot remove `file': Read-only file system

Is there any way to get HAL to do my bidding?  Or do I need to take him
"offline"?

Thanks for any help or suggestions!
Jerry