Peter,

I do hope that the wrecklessness with which people are treating other peoples machines on the IRC channel at the moment doesn't result in the loss of anyones important data.

I think you missed the beginning of the conversation (which has been going on for a few days) where wildfire_cs explained that this was a new machine with a clean Ubuntu installation and hence no data to lose.

As far as I'm concerned getting a less than expert user to edit /etc/fstab via instructions on IRC is asking for trouble.

As far as I'm concerned, they were being very careful and telling wildfire_cs how to mount the ntfs partition read-only and hence no data would be lost from that partition only.

Just my 2 cents, but people are generally not irresponsible with their advice in IRC and wouldn't tell a 'less than expert user' anything that would endanger their system

Dave