Thanks for following up. >possibilities: > >- mount is not made by same user doing cd /mnt/windows > > I edited /etc/fstab as root, and ran the mount -a command as root. But I have a regular user account "dave" for day to day use. But whether I am accessing /mnt/windows as root or as dave, it comes up empty. >- mount is not made by same user running gnome/nautilus > > This is the case. Root is mounting the drive, and dave is running gnome/nautilus. But I'm a little confused. Only root has the permission to edit /etc/fstab or run the mount command, so how would dave access these functions? In any case, as mentioned, even root finds the directory empty. >- mount references /dev/hda1 but hard drive has different device >assignment > > I assumed it was /dev/hda1 because this is what fdisk told me: Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hda1 * 1 3649 29310561 c W95 FAT32 (LBA) >dmesg| less #check to see if the drive is assigned a different letter > > This came up with a bunch of stuff. Is this what I'm looking for?: hda: max request size: 128KiB hda: 58633344 sectors (30020 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=58168/16/63, UDMA(66) hda: cache flushes not supported hda: hda1 >df -h shows mounted filesystems and usage > > [root at localhost ~]# df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/hdb1 28G 20G 6.6G 76% / none 125M 0 125M 0% /dev/shm >are you user 512? > > I don't know. But I want any user of this computer - in other words, me, regardless of what permissions setting or log in account I happen to be using - to access the drive. >are you running mount as yourself and not root? > > This is what happens if I do: [dave at localhost ~]$ mount -a mount: only root can do that As mentioned before, I was doing all the configurations as root, because I assumed I had to be root in order to be mucking about with the drives and whatnot. >has the drive been fixed with scandisk/checkdisk since the assault by >linux fsck? > > Heh heh... "assault". I like that. Anyway... I think so. I ran Windows, and it immediately complained about the disk and ran scandisk which seemed to have worked as Windows could read the files okay, or at least run the programs associated with those files. A lot of files got "assaulted", so at this point I can't be 100% sure that they've all been corrected. But from a Windows world point of view the disk has been scanned and corrected. >short answer, it shouldn't make a difference being connected via >internal IDE or external firewire except as external firewire, it would >be assigned something more like /dev/sda instead of /dev/hda > > Okay, good to know it's not a connection issue, and more likely a settings issue. Dave