External hard drive permissions issue

[Guest]

Hi,
I have a machine that has a fresh Kubuntu install on the internal hard drive. I have hooked up my usb external hard drive and am not able to access it. I have gone in as root and manually mounted the drive, but now cannot change the permissions to allow my normal user to access the drive. Even when I am root, I keep recieving the message that I cannot change the permissions. When I try to reassign ownership through the terminal (chown) it says that it is a read only folder. Any advice is appreciated.
-Sam

[cantab]

Re: External hard drive permissions issue

What file system does the external drive use? I'm assuming it's either VFAT or NTFS, probably the latter since that would explain the read-only issue.
One solution is to include an entry in your fstab, with the 'user' or 'users' option, for example

UUID=FFFF-FFD6 /media/mp3player    vfat  noatime,users,noexec

('user' will only allow the user that mounted to unmount, 'users' lets anyone logged in unmount). Files will then be owned by the user that mounted.
Another is to set the 'umask'. But I'm not certain how they work.