Permanently mount wd external usb drive and share via samba?

[Sam Fielder]

I am having difficulty setting up this drive (wd mybook home 500gb 
connected via usb). I have three partitions and some unused space, one 
is the fat32 original partition shrunk down to 10Gb and two 100Gb fat32 
partitions each with 100Gb of empty space (unallocated) at the end to 
expand into if needed or to be used at a later date. These partitions 
are going to be mounted on my fileserver (edubuntu 7.10) and used as 
backup/storage for various computers on the network, so the folders on 
each partition will need to be shared by a combination of samba and nfs 
to my various linux and windows clients. I am having difficulty on two 
things.

1
I don't want to use the auto mount feature (which does work but gives 
ugly mount points and varies on boot, which is not ideal for network 
shares) . I want to mount each partition to a separate, named point on 
/media (/media/pictures and /media/backup). I can do this, but I cannot 
seem to get the partitions to mount writable for standard users, I am 
able to write as root. I can't figure out how to write the fstab line to 
do what I want. I've tried several options, but none seem to work. Here 
is the setup that works for read-only:

UUID=XXXX-XXXX	media/pictures	vfat	rw,defaults	0	0
UUID=YYYY-YYYY	media/backup	vfat	rw,defaults	0	0

any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

2
Setting up folders on each partiton as samba shares. I hve done it 
before, but can't remember exactly how. I haven't put a lot of time into 
this yet because the partitions aren't mounted correctly, so just a 
pointer to documentation would probably be good enough for now.

thanks

Sam