Mounting of vfat partitions and accession privilege management mapping (fstab, vfat, umask, fmask, dmask, users)

First published April 4, 2007 • Last modified on July 18, 2026 • 1 min read • 109 words Old Windows (i.e. fat partitions) are no problem for Linux. advanced installers like Yast automatically recognize them and make them available under Linux. However, sometimes the accession privileges are not as you need them. In order to make a fat partition (un)mountable to all users and make every file/directory +rwx for everybody, the fstab needs to look like this: /dev/hda2 /media/windows/E vfat defaults,users,uid=500,gid=100,umask=000 0 0 Additionally Linux owner 500 and group 100 mapped as an for all files. You can also set privileges separately for files (fmask) and directories (dmask). For umask you need to give the inverse octal, meaning: 000 means all privileges and 777 means no privileges.