I've almost got this solved. To make a long story of experimentation short, using the check disk utility inside Windows XP was not sufficient for ensuring the partition was in working order. I had to use my trusty Win98 boot disk, and run scandisk from there, where it fixed something to do with the directory structure. And then I went back to XP and ran checkdisk, where it then found cross linked files to repair. Not that I know what a cross linked file is, but my suspicion is that this all had something to do with the assault that Linux performed on my disk when I tried to mount the drive with the wrong settings. So where I'm at now is that I can mount the drive from the command line like so: [root at localhost ~]# mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows ... but only the root user can see it. I want to be able to make it so that any user (which is almost always me, but sometimes I'm root, sometimes I'm just a user with the account "dave") can access the drive, and that it comes up in Gnome/Nautilus on boot. Here is what I currently have in /etc/fstab: /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat rw,uid=512,gid=1002 0 0 This also only seems to give root access. "dave" can not access the drive, and it does not show up in Gnome/Nautilus. In this thread I got a lot of different variations on what that line should read, so I'm not sure which is the best for my situation. How do I ensure universal read/write access to the disk for all users on my computer? Dave