Sorry, been out for a while. This is pretty easy to do. If you want both you and your girlfriend to be able to access the WIN drive but noone else, create a UNIX group that both of your userIDs belong to (e.g. "ddrive" group) and set up your entry in /etc/fstab like this:
/dev/hda5 /mnt/win vfat uid=501,gid=503,umask=007 0 0
where "501" would be the number associated with your userid from /etc/passwd and the "503" being the number associated with the "ddrive" group from /etc/group. Then when you do an "ls -l /mnt/win" you should see the files are owned by "calum" and group of "ddrive" and have permissions set like this:
-rwxrwx--- (on files) and drwxrwx--- (on directories)
NOTE: You don't actually have to set the "uid" in this example since both of you are covered in the "ddrive" group, just stuck it in as an example.
Of course you can give full access to anyone on your computer by:
/dev/hda5 /mnt/win vfat umask=000 0 0
which should show owner of "root" group of "root" and permissions like:
-rwxrwxrwx (on files) and drwxrwxrwx (on directories)
After you make the change to /etc/fstab just unmount and mount the /mnt/win partition and you should see the effects immediately:
# umount /mnt/win; mount /mnt/win
You can "chmod" all day long on FAT/FAT32 partitions and it will not work because FAT/FAT32 are not capable of Windows file system security let alone UNIX file system security. The security must be set globally at mount time as in my example. NTFS is the only Windows file system capable of file/directory security, and then only from Windows.
And if anyone would like a more in depth discussion on permissions including chmod, octal, umask, user/group, ACLs etc, feel free to start another topic and I would be more than happy to cover this for the n00bs..
[ March 15, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]