On Monday 26 February 2007 19:18, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On Monday 26 February 2007, Chris wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I have a dual boot windows / Gentoo system.  I have my NTFS (windows)
> > main partition listed in fstab with "user,noauto,nosuid, noatime".  A
> > normal user can mount and umount it, but cannot change directories,
> > look at files, etc. as they'll get a permission denied error.  When I
> > list the files and dirs, they all show up as belonging to
> > "root:root", with no access for group and others.
> >
> > My question is:  Is there a way to allow normal users to at least
> > read these files and change dirs, short of chown and/or chmod on the
> > NTFS partition?
>
> ntfs does not understand unix permissions, so there is no concept of a
> unix owner and group. You use the uid and gid options to fudge one -
> normally root:root is ok.
>
> Then to set permissions, use the umask option. 0555 should be OK -
> read/execute for all. It must be 5 otherwise you can't cd into a
> directory.
>
> Actually you want fmask and dmask options like as in vfat, but mount -t
> ntfs doesn't support that, so you have to make do with umask.

Whilst you're at it you may want to consider ntfs-3g which can also write to 
ntfs:

 http://packages.gentoo.org/search/?sstring=ntfs3g

I haven't had any corruption or failures so far (keeps fingers crossed) but I 
am not sure that I would trust a production environment to it.  You mileage 
may vary.
-- 
Regards,
Mick