Can't get access to USB drives as normal user

Q I have a couple of pen drives for transferring files between my Windows laptop and my Mandrake 10.1 PC. I can get read access to the pen drive as user but whatever I do, I cannot get write access to the removable drive as a user, only as root. I cannot change the group to my sharing group or my user, and owner remains as root. Even logged in as root I am told that I do not have enough permissions to change the group/ownership of mnt/removeable. When I change permissions it is still inaccessible when I return to user and ownership is returned to root. I have also been unable to transfer it to a sharing group. I have tried running the partitioner and allowing write access to all users but this also fails. I understand that if I install SUSE 9.2 I will get full read/write access but is there a less dramatic answer?

A You can allow users to mount and write to devices by modifying the /etc/fstab file. A typical fstab entry that permits user mounting of files is:

/dev/sdb1 /mnt/usb-key            ext3
defaults,user          0          0

The user option allows the device to be mounted by a non-root user, who can then write data to the USB device. Remember to umount the device before unplugging it from the machine, otherwise you risk potential data corruption due to files not being written completely.

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