mnttool vs. manual mount

[Pseudoman]

I've tried mounting a USB floppy drive manually from the console, but I can't write to the disk unless I have root privileges. I tried sudo chmod 777 /mnt/sdd, but it doesn't set the permissions.

When I use mnttool, I can access the drive, no problem. ls -l /mnt/sdd shows that it is in 777 mode (drwxrwxrwx).

What does mnttool do to mount drives, and how can I do it manually so I don't have to start X up every time I need to access a floppy disk? I would like understand the difference and learn what is going on.

Thanks in advance.

[Rich]

Hi Pseudoman
You should be able to mount the drive as a regular user like this:

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mount /mnt/sddand be able to read/write to it.

[Rich]

Hi Pseudoman
Back to your question, mnttool gets a list of mountable devices from /etc/fstab by running the  mountables.sh
script. That script creates the file  /tmp/mountables. Each line in  /tmp/mountables  contains a device name
followed by a ~ followed by the volume name if it exists. You should be able to mount any of those devices
using:

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mount /mnt/deviceThe device will be mounted according to the conditions set in  /etc/fstab. If fstab lists the device as  RO  then
that device is mounted as read only by default.

[Pseudoman]

Thanks for the responses.
Looks like I've been using the mount command incorrectly for the past few years...

I had been using:

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sudo mount /dev/sdd /mnt/sddinstead of

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mount /mnt/sdd
Thanks for the explanation of how mnttool works. I can now better appreciate how it simplifies all that work.
Again, thank you.

[Rich]

Hi Pseudoman
It's not incorrect, just unnecessary when mounting items listed in fstab. If you wanted to mount a drive to
/home/tc/documents , then you would need to use the version you cited, since  /home/tc/documents  is
not associated with a device in fstab. You would most likely also want to  chown  and  chmod  on that
mount point so that user  tc  could work with it.