Mounting a Partition

I wanted to have a partition which could be mounted, read and written to by the user james. When I've mounted other filesystems in the past I've simply been able to specify a gid in /etc/fstab but I realised today that different filesystems have different options and gid isn't supported by the ext3 filesystem. Instead I had to add this line:

/dev/hdd4   /home/james/files   ext3   defaults,users   0  0

and then as root after mounting the partition run:

chown -R james /home/james/files

This way all the files had the correct permissions and everything worked fine.

All the options for different filesystem are described towards the end of:

man mount

This fstab guide explains some of the other options available.

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