Cannot write as user on automounted ext3 in Gnome

[lexming]

Hi,
I have an external USB HD with 3 partitions, 2 EXT3 and 1 NTFS. Every partition is automounted correctly and it appears on the Gnome desktop. The problem is that I cannot write on the EXT3 partitions as non-root user. The funny thing is that the NTFS partition works perfectly, it automounts and I can read/write it.

In the gconf editor there are settings for autmounting NTFS and other types of partitions where I can set the uid= option, but there aren't such things for EXT3 partitions. Do you know where I could set those permissions on automounted EXT3 partitions?

BTW, I don't have any reference to external drives on my fstab. And this is not a fresh gentoo installation, I think that this feature got broken on my system after the gnome 2.26 upgrade.

Thanks a lot!

[c00l.wave]

How much free disk space is left? Maybe you reserved the default 5% for the exclusive use by root? You can check for reserved memory by running tune2fs -l /dev/sdXY - it should show something like that if disabled:

[Jaglover]

Reserved space is needed to keep fragmentation low. I wouldn't recommend disabling it. Depending on drive use and size 5% may be too much, you have to make an educated decision.

[c00l.wave]

AFAIK 5% are not enough to maintain low fragmentation. I remember having read that 15% was the recommended space that would need to remain free, but it also depends on the filesystem and its version. However, if you run below 5-10% you usually simply need the space and don't care about fragmentation any more. Instead you should delete the largest files ASAP and don't keep it that low for long. Since it's a USB disk I guess that's the usual case, so turning it off (or setting it to a low amount like 1% by using -m 1) would be okay. I would always reserve some memory on a root system, though.

Being a USB disk with rather slow transfer rates I would assume that even a higher fragmentation rate doesn't change much; seek times on the disk and the cache refillment should be faster than the transfer from the internal cache to the connected PC. At least if the system is doing some read-ahead. But feel free to correct me if I'm wrong; I rarely use USB HDDs.
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nohup nice -n -20 cp /dev/urandom /dev/null &

[lexming]

Thank you for the comments.

The most filled partition has 40% of free space, so I don't think that the reserved space is causing the problem.

This is the dmesg when I plug in the HD