Thanks Again Lah7.
Aside of entries for /boot, /, /home - all my fstab had were my 2 other partitions for storage & backups - then 3 other entries.
1 was for a USB stick, 1 for my external HDD, 1 for another disk I no longer use, so all are now commented out.
The only oddity was seeing /home marked as dirty, which I corrected.
After that editing...nothing has changed, sadly.
Given that I CANNOT change it anyhow - neither can I rename then unless I reformat them - and that I cannot change their perms either, this remains a null idea presently.
Ooopsy:
The exact opposite is actually needed;
They NEED to ALWAYS automount & as permissionlessly as possible, without delay !!
Given that in order for my backup system to work as desired, all sticks will be labeled identically - but:
That will not matter if this goofiness cannot be defeated.
Since I cannot change ownership or perms on ANY of the many PCs that I have tried it on - this suggests to me that this IS exactly an OS centered problem as they ALL have the same OS...?
I do have a tester NB with 20.04.x installed & I may find that & give it a try as well, if I have time later tonight...
Thanks in advance for any further assistance !!