I sounds like /media/MUSPELHEIM doesn't exist. (It must have been temporarily created before. I still haven't figured out the details of what's going on.) Create it and try mounting it again as a regular user (with that entry still in fstab):

EDIT: If that didn't exist, that is probably why it wasn't getting mounted at boot time when using the other fstab entry. Why don't you try what I just said, and if it works, remove the noauto and user options from the fstab entry (i.e., go back to what it was before) and see if it mounts correctly at boot time.

Sweet. Worked like a charm. Now I just need to figure out this dual monitor thing and I'm set. Any idea how to exit X to the satisfaction of a nvidia driver?

I'm not sure exactly what you are trying to do, but if you take gdm down, X should go with it.

Of, course, you should not do this from with X! Switch to a virtual terminal (VT) by pressing one of ctr-alt-F1 through ctrl-alt-F6. In Ubunutu I usually skip F1 because it's filled with all the boot stuff. Log into your account. (In case you've never done this before, I'll let you know that when logging in at a VT -- or any other non-graphical login -- you don't get any feedback as you type in your password -- it looks like nothing is happening.) Once logged in you can issue the following commands to stop, start, or restart gdm Restart is just stop followed immediately by a start. I hope this is what you were looking for.

When you start or restart gdm the display will immediately (possibly after a little flickering) show the graphical screen. But you are still logged in to the VT. You can go back to the VT by pressing ctrl-alt-F[1-6] again.

EDIT: Depending on your Xorg.conf fie, you can also instantly kill X by (from within X) by pressing ctrl-alt-Backspace. This abruptly kills X w/o giving anything a chance to shutdown nicely. If you do this, gdm and X should restart after a few seconds and you'll be back at the graphical login.

CURSES. Since I often work with ISO files that are larger than 4GB, at the advice of people on another thread, I backed up all the stuff on NIFLHEIM and reformatted it to EXT3. After installing IFS drivers on my windows environment, it works fine there, but it's having trouble mounting at boot on Ubuntu again. Here's the line I'm using in FSTAB:

And the error I get when trying to mount manually from X is: "You do not have permission to mount 'Niflheim'"

If I do
I get

Notably, as usual, I can mount it manually with a password if it's not in FSTAB

Sorry to be such a bother, but can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong here? I plan to convert the MUSPELHEIM volume as well once I figure this out.

The umask option is not valid with ext3. Try this:

BTW, the mount man page lists what options are valid with each type of filesystem and what they do. In most cases the same options that are valid for the mount command are valid in fstab. There are some exceptions.

Ah, okay, got it to mount, but it claims that Root is the owner, thus I can't write files without sudo. Any way to change that, or do I have to repartition the drive?

Ext3 uses standard *nix permissions. So you can use chown, chgrp, and chmod as usual. For example, to change it so you own everything on the partition, give the command (with the partition mounted):

The colon (:) following the username means the group will also be changed to your login group. (In Ubuntu, by default this will be the same name as your user name.) After you own everything, you won't have to use sudo anymore if you just want to change permissions on the partition.

Just to kind of wrap this up and tie everything together concerning what we've discussed about mounting these filesystems, I'll point out that the umask=, uid=, etc options are used as work-arounds with vfat because vfat doesn't understand *nix permissions. So it's driver uses those mount options to "fake it." Which is where we began this thread: you were wondering why chown and chmod weren't working with vfat. I hope it all makes sense now.

Cool, so now I have Niflheim running as an ext3 partition. I'll probably do that to Muspelheim later, but I don't have a pressing need to at the moment, since I'm only really using that partition to install larger applications on both OSes, and I don't imagine that will involve any large files (Certainly not over 4GB).

Meanwhile, I still can't get Nvidia's drivers to install. I successfully killed X, but going into the installation, it says I don't have libc headers for my distribution installed, and thus it can't compile a kernel. How do I install said headers?

I'm a little confused why a kernel needs to be compiled. While I'm rather at the edge of my knowledge here, I thought everything you needed could be downloaded as binaries w/o the need to compile anything.

Anyway, I've never compiled a Ubuntu kernel, and the kernels I have compiled didn't need anything extra installed. But I know there are articles on the Internet specifically about compiling a kernel in Ubuntu. If you really think you need to do this, I'd suggest searching for one of these articles; it will probably tell you what packages you need to download.

BTW, I quickly looked at the output of

and didn't see any likely suspects. Maybe I just missed it.

Hm... Well, it does give the option to try to download a precompiled kernel online... but it never seems able to reach the server it needs, and then claims it needs to compile one itself, and then that since my libc headers aren't installed, it can't. I'll look for those articles. Thanks muchly for all the help.