How do I mount an ntfs partition without root password?

[stephanb]

When I click on my Vista partition under "Places" in the Fedora menus, I'm asked to enter the root password for mounting the partition. Is there a way to allow any user to mount this particular partition, to avoid the unnecessary input? The partition is not listed in /etc/fstab (fedora 12 for x86_64).

[Adunaic]

why don't you just put the partition in /etc/fstab that way it will be mounted on boot.

open a terminal and become root.
make a directory which you want the drive to be mounted as /media/vista and then open /etc/fstab in your favourite editor and add teh following line at the bottom (where /dev/sda5 should be replaced with where your vista partition is)

/dev/sda5 /media/vista ntfs defaults 0 0
^ ^ ^
drive mount point file type

Does this help?

[stephanb]

Thanks for the answer, but I actually prefer to mount the Vista partition only in sessions when I need to access some data on it. At other times I feel that the mounting clutters my desktop and that loading the software for handling ntfs into memory unnecessarily consumes (a little bit of) resources.

So I like to use the "Places" menu for mounting my Vista partition. When a USB disk gets mounted, then no root password is asked, but the mount options in /etc/mtab are the same for both disks:

/dev/sdb1 /media/Iomega\040HDD fuseblk rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096,default_p ermissions 0 0
/dev/sda1 /media/Vista fuseblk rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096,default_p ermissions 0 0

Why the root password is requested for the Vista partition, but not the USB disk, is a mystery for me, but I guess that this is configurable somewhere.

[marriedto51]

You can put the option "users" in the fstab entry to allow all users to mount/unmount the partition. I don't know whether that works with the fuseblk filesystem type, but I know you can do it with other types. (You would add "users" to the list of options separated by commas.)

I have never quite understood how fuse works, either, so if someone else can explain how to configure who mounts and where I'd be interested to know, too!

[Hlingler]

... I actually prefer to mount the Vista partition only in sessions when I need to access some data on it ...

In /etc/fstab, use the 'noauto' and 'users' options to prevent auto-mounting and allow any user(s) to mount/un-mount, respectively. Read: man mount .

I don't know whether that works with the fuseblk filesystem type ...

Yes.

Why the root password is requested for the Vista partition, but not the USB disk, is a mystery for me ...

Different services are controlling the mounting of the different devices, and/or different policies apply to the different device types.

V

[stephanb]

After adding to /etc/fstab a line

/dev/sda1 /media/Vista fuseblk rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096,default_p ermissions,noauto,users 0 0

mounting the Vista partition via the "Places" menu doesn't work any more, mount point "/media/Vista" is missing. However, I don't want to create "/media/Vista" permanently, because /media is obviously supposed to contain only active mount points. And if I create the mount point somewhere else (eg in /mnt), then after mounting the partition is not shown on the desktop, and the nautilus window for it doesn't pop up. So I don't think that the permissions for dynamic mounts by fuse are supposed to be configured via lines in /etc/fstab. It must be somewhere else.