Ubuntu

How can I mount vfat USB drive on $HOME so that I can modify files

Asked by alpha1

I have some USB pen drives formatted as vfat. I am using Kubuntu 9.04. If I simply use:

sudo mount /dev/sdXX $HOME/<directory where I want it mounted>

it automatically sets the ownership as root and the permissions for everyone but root as read only.

I cannot mount it without using sudo.

When I plug it in, a pop-up will let me access it with Dolphin, after which it is mounted in /media and I am the owner, so I can modify the contents. However that is NOT where I want it -- for some applications, it must be mounted in my home directory if I want them to be able to manipulate the contents (e.g. GIMP, KPhotoAlbum, etc.)

I tried

ln -s /media/<device name as reported by Dolphin> <directory in $HOME> which does not work. (at least not today. It seemed to work one time, but never again after rebooting, etc.)

Is there an easy way to solve this problem?

I think I could do this OK with System Setting>Advanced>Disk Management in older versions of Kubuntu, however that functionality seems to have disappeared in 9.04.

Thanks for any help.

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Larry Jordan (larryjor) said : 		#1

     I would recommend looking at fstab (read about it with 'man fstab') and setting it up to be user mountable with read/write permissions. Believe this is avoided by default because of worries about security issues (which never made sense to me, but they say anyone can set up a usb stick to boot it's own programs or even system).

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alpha1 (wmstrome) said : 		#2

For some unknown, mysterious reason, after several reboots I again mounted the USB drive using Dolphin (which mounts it in /media/<USB Identifier> and using ln -s I was able to create a directory in my home folder. Why it quit working this morning and only started to work again this evening after several reboots (for other reasons), I have no idea!

By the way, the USB drive is NOT in fstab. However, it IS in mtab:
/dev/sdb1 /media/KINGSTON vfat rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=hal,uid=1000,utf8,shortname=mixed 0 0

I will leave this open as needing an answer for a few days to see if the ln -s will work reliably for all my different vfat USB drives.

Thanks for the patience and help.

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Launchpad Janitor (janitor) said : 		#3

This question was expired because it remained in the 'Open' state without activity for the last 15 days.

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alpha1 (wmstrome) said : 		#4

I seem to have solved the problem. If I mount the drive using Dolphin, the link something in my home directory to /media/<USB drive>, I can access it now