I am a bit rusty because it has been a few years since I last worked extensively on UNIX but I think I understand what you are getting at. I just installed Ubuntu and permitted it to set up the configuration. When I look at /etc/fstab I don't see any of the hard disk partitions described in it, not even the main file system. # /etc/fstab: static file system information. # # <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass> proc /proc proc defaults 0 0 # /dev/sdb1 UUID=f900070e-2701-4360-98c3-68bc817d012b / ext3 relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1 # /dev/sdb5 UUID=d8a7d02f-441c-4d94-8db3-df02963da66b none swap sw 0 0 /dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0 As I understand the above both the main file system and the swap entry are commented out, and there is no entry whatsoever for the Windows partition. Yet in the running system /dev/sdb1 is mounted on /media/disk and /dev/sda1 (the Windows NTFS partition) is mounted on /media/disk-1. You will appreciate that being rusty on linux I am cautious about mucking around in these configuration files. I don't want the automount daemon that is obviously fixing up my configuration to get into a fight with fstab. I suspect, although I no longer have a copy of it to check, that the previous release of Ubuntu did a hard mount through fstab, and that would explain why the program worked in that release, and not in this one.
