I just checked the fstab manual
My understanding of it is that it is used to mount devices like hard
drives cdroms etc.
In my case it is that I am in front of the win2000 machine and I can see
the actual files in my Debian box but I can't add files or folders from
the win2000 machine.
However I can do all that from the Debian machine.
Does this still sound like the problem you had and do you still think it
has to do with fstab?
I am asking because there is one option about mounting partitions from
remote systems. An option called nfs.