I have just copied some files off of a secondary hard drive using mv. The only problem is I can't access them now. I can look in the folder if I'm logged in as root, but I can't do anything else. The permissions are set at -r----... I've tried "chmod a+rw *" and it says: "chmod: changing permissions of 'filename': Read-only file system. I then check the permissions and it's still the same. Anyone know what I'm doing wrong?

You file system is mount as read-only. You have to mount is as read-write. What is the file system that the reside in? If it is an NTFS, you probually do not want to write to it.

It sounds like you have mounted the filesystem in readonly mode - check the output of "mount"

The hard drive (/dev/hdb1) is NTFS. I just want to get all my music off of it because I'm replacing it with a bigger drive. How do I mount it as read-write then?

The drive your files are on is probably NTFS, as I ran into the same problem after I installed Linux and tried to access some files from my other HD otherwise than root.
You can anyway set the permissions on the entire drive to whatever you want by editing the /etc/fstab file. Add a line like this:

/dev/hda5 /mnt/hda5 ntfs ro,user,uid=1001,umask=000 0 0

Note that here is a line from my fstab file and hda5 is the other HD in my situation. So change the line accordingly.
And be careful if you add the line at the end of the file, leave another line blank as the last line.

Looks like we posted at the same time
In this case, the line should be:
/dev/hdb1 /mnt/hdb1 ntfs ro,user,uid=1001,umask=000 0 0

P.S. check if the /mnt/hdb1 directory exists. If not, create it.

Just copy the music. You do not need write premission to copy.

To answer your question, /etc/fstab is where the mounting is handled.

Also, check the file permissions on the directory that the partition is mounted. That is if you want to enter it as non-root.

This is what I'm trying to do. Like I said though, I can't do anything with the copied music. Konquer shows the icons all with a little lock on them. And ls -l says they only have -r--- permission. And I can't change the permission (of the copied files).

tangle, are you gonna celebrate the 1000th post? Maybe we get invited

Nah, 1000 posts is 1000 posts. My luck half of them where bad advice anyways, lol.