Cheers man, i shall also give this a go.

Alien: Forgive me for my lack of linux knowledge but i cant seem to find the fluxbox folder - is this something you added yourself.

tjc/mjl: Regarding your ideas i have now added the command line you asked for to the bottom of bootmisc. Now when i run the 'ls -al /myth/music' command you suggested depending if the usb drive is mounted i get the following results.

Prior to the 'mount -a' command being run i get the following

total 8
drwxrwxr-x 2 mythtv mythtv 4096 Feb 24 11:35 .
drwxr-xr-x 16 root root 4096 Feb 24 11:50 ..

After the 'mount -a' command being run i get the following result (by the way i changed the permissions of the music folder by running 'chmod 755').

total 164
drwxrwxrwx 6 root root 32768 Jan 1 1970 .
drwxr-xr-x 16 root root 4096 Feb 24 11:50 ..
drwxr-xr-x 152 root root 32768 Feb 19 18:02 My Music
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 32768 Feb 19 18:02 Recycled
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 32768 Feb 18 18:36 System Volume Information
drwxr-xr-x 20 root root 32768 Feb 20 17:41 video

It doesnt seem to make much difference though as i still need to run 'mount -a' or 'mount /myth/music' after bootup before i can access the drive

Forgot to mention about the chown command you asked me to perform after mounting the usb harddrive.

chown mythtv:mythtv /myth/music

throws the error 'operation not permitted' even if i am the superuser. Interestingly if i run

'ls -al /myth'

prior to me running 'mount -a' the owner of the music folder is 'mythtv'. However after running 'mount -a' the owner becomes 'root'. Not sure whats going on here?

Hi,
/myth should not change ownership with mounting.
ls -al /
ls -al /myth
ls -al /myth/music
ls -al /myth/music/*

Each should be owned by mythtv:mythtv
chown mythtv:mythtv /myth/music
chown mythtv:mythtv /myth/music/*
chown mythtv:mythtv /myth/music/*/*
repeat untl you get an error of no more files.

check the permissions also as group and other need to be able to read the files (755 should be ok)

Change the name of My Music to be MyMusic,simply do mv "/myth/music/My Music" /myth/music/MyMusic the space in the directory name may give issues as a space is a seperator so it looks like directories My and Music in some cases.

See if that helps.
Mike

Ok so chown just wont do it, still getting the error 'operation not permitted'. So in the fstab file i added

uid=mythtv,gid=mythtv

This seems to change the permission for everything to mythtv - which is great. However it still isnt mounting automatically - i still have to run

'mount -a' or 'mount /myth/music' from my command line before mythtv will pick it up.

Also i changed the name of 'My Music' to 'MyMusic' as requested but still no joy Inside the MyMusic folder i have other folders such as 'DJ Shadow' so would i necessarily need to change the name of these such folders. The owner of folders such as these is mythtv in all instances.

Its getting to the stage where i would be quite happy to open up my system via vnc to let someone else have a bash.