The reason why you can always write to anything as root is because  
you have the exact same permissions as the system. Can you reply with  
the following?

?> ls -al /media

You should see something like this:

[root]# ls -al /home
drwxr-xr-x   4 root     root     4096 Aug 15  2006 .
drwxr-xr-x  23 root     root     4096 May 24 13:04 ..
drwxr-xr-x  16 dtripp   dtripp   4096 May 10 16:33 dtripp
drwx------  10 guestftp guestftp 4096 May  2 09:04 guestftp

The thing to look at is the user and group name, in this case, for  
the folder dtripp, its user: dtripp, group: dtripp.

If the user is root and the group is root, then your regular user  
will have no access to it, and you will see something like this:

[guestftp]$ whoami
guestftp
[guestftp]$ cd /root
-bash: cd: /root: Permission denied
[guestftp]$

Or you may have the user/group/world priviledges mixed up, so that  
even though the user technically has access to it, the permissions  
won't allow it:

drwxr-x---   8 root root  4096 Apr 28 13:59 root

Like that, where the world has no access to /root


- Donald Tripp
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----------------------------------------------
HPC Systems Administrator
High Performance Computing Center
University of Hawai'i at Hilo
200 W. Kawili Street
Hilo,   Hawaii   96720
http://www.hpc.uhh.hawaii.edu


On May 29, 2007, at 9:02 AM, Claudiu Tanaselia wrote:

> I have an ext3 partition that I can't write to using a normal user. My
> line from fstab look like this:
>
> /dev/sda2               /media/storage          ext3     
> defaults,users  0 0
>
> I did chown and chmod -R +rw, no effect.
>
> This might be a basic linux thing, but until recently my only ext3
> partition was the root one so I never encounter this problem, now I
> decided to convert my whole harddrive into ext3, but I can write to it
> only as root.
>
> Thank you,
> Claudiu.