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 [log in to unmask] ---------------------------------------------- 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.