vfat in fstab - no write access?

[wentzr]

I have a fat32 drive with the label "PARAMEDIA". paramedia is just a partitioned chunk of this laptops internal drive which I share between ubuntuStudio, ArtistX and Windows. I'd like to get AVlinux working w/ this drive as well. I can mount the volume, I've got it in my fstab so it automounts but I am not able to write to the partition regardless of the multiple mount options I use for the other OSs:


LABEL=PARAMEDIA  /media/paramedia vfat    user,rw,noauto      0   0

LABEL=PARAMEDIA  /media/paramedia vfat    utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0       1

either of these will mount paramedia but I am defiantly not able to write to the volume.

Any help appreciated.

thx!

[GMaq]

So it's a write permissions issue, why do you have it in your AV Linux fstab? doesn't AV Linux mount it as a removable drive? ArtistX and Ubustudio are both Ubuntu...perhaps they have some sort of Volume management or policykit voodoo on that drive. Do you use the same username on all the OS'?

[wentzr]

Thanks Gmaq..
Yes AV linux automounts it as a removable drive w/o any entry for it in my AVLinux fstab, however it's read only....therefore I attempted to explicitly define the mount options in AVLinux's fstab. I chmod -R 777'd the mount point, so I should be covered in regards to permissions... honestly it feels like the voodoo lies w/ avlinux as avlinux is the OS having issues w/ writing to the volume regardless of the options set in its fstab.

I'm operating right now on the AVLinux live disk, and yes it automounts the *volume* (its not a separate drive but a fat32 partition on my laptops single internal drive) but it's read only now as well, operating off the AVLinux live disk.

yes artistx and ubuntu studio are ubuntu.. but isn't ubuntu essentially debian just as avlinux is?!? either way the volume is rw in ubuntu, so I suppose I'll just give avlinux the axe as my project files reside on this fat32 partition. ... it's a shame as avlinux certainly provides me with the least amount of latency on this laptop.

[GMaq]

Hehe

I wasn't trying to blame 'buntu, Gnome uses policykit and Ubiquity their installer uses LVM (Linux Volume Management) and AV Linux uses neither and I'm not sure whether they might prevent the drive from being mounted by an outside OS on purpose for security reasons. Other than USB drives I don't have any fat32 Hard drive partitions to test, it's possible it is a Debian bug in 'mount' but I haven't had any other reports on this.

OTOH on one PC here I have AV Linux set up with /home on a separate partition as well as several other ext3 partitions, if I run an AV LiveUSB Key on this machine it will mount every partition on the machine except the /home partition that belongs to the original install so obviously the permissions on that /home partition have been altered by the resident OS on the machine. I'm suggesting that perhaps Ubuntu has altered the permissions similarly on your FAT32 drive.

[wentzr]

I gotcha.

So I went with that, backed up everything on this fat32 partition, blew it away and reformatted the partition in gparted (launched from the terminal as su) as a fat32 partition with a volume label "PARAMEDIA" from within AVLinux.

I removed any entry in my fstab pertaining to this volume then rebooted back into AVlinux...

The volume automounts at login, great.

I do a touch blah in terminal in the volumes mount point and get "permission denied".
I try to create a file in the volume using the GUI and get the same error.
And since the volume isn't even in my fstab, there's no mount point to chmod.
I can NOT write to a fat 32 volume which was created in AVLinux from within AVLinux.... that's definitely not right.

[wentzr]

Confirmed its not just this laptop.. I installed AVLinux on an HPD330 with two internal IDE drives. I formatted one in AVLinux as fat32, didn't touch the fstab, rebooted and yes the volume mounts but I get "permission denied" on any attempt to write to the fat32 volume that was created in AVLinux.

How is the volume automounting in AVLinux if it isn't in my fstab?!?

It doesn't seem very secure that a volume would mount that isn't the system or the user's home volume if they have one... How are you tricking AVLinux to automount every volume in the system????

AVLinux has got to be the only Linux distro I've ever used that automounts every volume in the computer... My hunch is whatever is doing this is literally set to mount fat volumes as read-only.... I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts once you try and test this on your system there, as you mentioned you haven't tried.

Thanks a lot!

[wentzr]

OTOH on one PC here I have AV Linux set up with /home on a separate partition as well as several other ext3 partitions, if I run an AV LiveUSB Key on this machine it will mount every partition on the machine except the /home partition that belongs to the original install so obviously the permissions on that /home partition have been altered by the resident OS on the machine.

Well... yeah!! what would you expect??
your /home partition is owned by your installed system's user.
The live disk uses the live user, therefore it makes perfect sense that your system's /home doesn't mount when booting off a live USB disk. . .
I would be really freaked out if it did, as this is the whole point of /home.. it belongs to only you.. therefore only you should be able to automount it.

[GMaq]

Not quite that simple... 'tester' is the user in both cases in my example, of course if the username was different you'd be right.

[wentzr]

No it isn't that simple!
dig deeper and you'll see that its not the user's name that the perms are set by.. It's set by a unique user ID. I could have 10 users named gmaq, but all users would have UUIDs, or Unique User IDs... therfore would only mount the home folder that goes with the users UUID....

Anyway.. It'd be great to get an answer on why AVLinux can't write to fat32 volumes that it creates.
Thanks

[GMaq]

Ok, fair enough

I didn't really put a whole lot of thought into it, it's the only time I've observed that AV Linux wouldn't mount all partitions on a system which was the point I was trying to make...'why' wasn't the all consuming question in my mind at the time. The Remastersys Control Panel contains a script called rbtmountallpartitions that does the automounting for convenience so that's why AV Linux mounts all partitions on a system.

As I said in my PM reply to you, I don't know offhand what the deal is with fat32 partitions, googling comes up with it as a common scenario in Debian with some varying advice in how to fix it. I'm not a Linux guru or claim to be, I'm also not afraid of saying "I don't know" and in this case at the current time I don't.

[wentzr]

cool. I just wanted to clear up your OTOH scenario... Glad you took it well    (although I was wrong - it's a UID, not a UUID)

So I've taken your suggestion, I'm going to reformat this partition as NTFS. Really the only reason i tend to stick with fat32 is that up until this voodoo it's the only partition type I know of that can be rw for OSX, Windows and Linux as I use them all for my music production.

But since I have no plans to run OS X on this vaio and the volume is only 100 or so GB I think NTFS should work just fine... I'm sure some user some where some day will be bugging you about this again (or then again, maybe not!!) so i really wanted to get to the bottom of it, as I'm sure you do too. . .

Thanks a ton for the prompt replies!