Linux: having problems mounting drive and then writing to it

[sybariten]

OK, i am running a headless linux machine that uses samba to , somewhat, share some stuff on the 4 gb OS drive ....
I know there are about a zillion ways to do these samba issues.
But however. lets focus on a very tiny problem first:
i have another 20 gb drive too, i want to mount it in one of the home dirs. When doing a simple mount, i can read all files, but they are owned by root. The files are from when the HD was in another machine. So, i have 20 gb files, that are owned by root, and i cand chown them down to a normal user.
Perhaps this is normal because of the way i mounted the drive? is there a way to mount it so that a normal user can make dirs on that drive ?
NB: i cant chown the files from root to "jake", even if i have SU:ed.
NB2: i guess this could be taken care of by an fstab line, but i would like to try to do it manually once first, with a mount command.

any ideas ?

[Soopafresh]

Post this on http://www.LinuxQuestions.org

[sybariten]

Post this on http://www.LinuxQuestions.org

Will do that ... earlier today, i even noticed i was registered there, without my knowledge.
Man this forum life is getting out of hands .... i got one forum for the swedisch social part, one for the swedish music (production) discussion, Futureproducers for international huge knowledgebase about production, Videohelp for everything that moves or at least "looks", linuxquestions for when things dont work, the clarkconnect forum for my server, and i still need a couple of more, for questions about python and imagemagick!!

[Garibaldi]

what does your fstab line look like? BTW what distro are you running? I've been running slackware for the past few months and have learned alot, I'll be glad to help however I can!
I would make sure you have read-write enabled in fstab first.

[sybariten]

what does your fstab line look like? BTW what distro are you running? I've been running slackware for the past few months and have learned alot, I'll be glad to help however I can!
I would make sure you have read-write enabled in fstab first.

Hello garibaldi,
the extra drive isnt added to the fstab yet, unless its been done automagically somewhere. Correct me if i'm wrong, but isnt the fstab just a helper for those units that you want to be able to mount "easily" by just typing "mount cdrom" or something .... ?

This drive will be in the fstab eventually, sure enough, but i'd just like to try and mount it without problems by hand first .... call me weird, but sometimes i like to feel that i can do things the "original way" before i do them the best way.

peace!

[Garibaldi]

Hello garibaldi,
the extra drive isnt added to the fstab yet, unless its been done automagically somewhere. Correct me if i'm wrong, but isnt the fstab just a helper for those units that you want to be able to mount "easily" by just typing "mount cdrom" or something .... ?

This drive will be in the fstab eventually, sure enough, but i'd just like to try and mount it without problems by hand first .... call me weird, but sometimes i like to feel that i can do things the "original way" before i do them the best way.

you can just mount it by typing mount xxx but it might be easier in your case instead of having to enter a long string each time to mount it do this:
in a xterm or konsole type:
su
mdir /mnt/hdx/
then open fstab in /etc/ and add a line for your drive. Now in konqueror go to devices:/, and you'll see you drive which you can now click on and mount. You can then create a shortcut to your desktop for easy access.