This seems to be a strange problem with an external hard drive.

I recently installed a new HD in my PC and installed slackware 13 so the smaller hard drive is going to be used as a backup. It used to have 2 partitions both reiserfs and when I plugged it in I had rwx access to it and there were no issues. I decided then that after I got all my important files off copied to my internal drive I could repartition the removable drive and reformat it. Ever since the reformat I no longer have w access to this drive when I plug it in. The drive mounts to /media/SlackBackup and when I look the permissions are

I looked at the device node as well:

When I look through /lib/udev/rules.d/65-permissions.rules the lines relevant for disks (sd*) says that the device should be set for the plugdev group which my account is a member of. This is not happening so I'm thinking something is messed up somewhere.

Also I tried adding the drive to fstab by UUID but it wouldn't let me write so I removed the entry.

Any help always appreciated.

I forgot to mention that I originally formatted the drive with vfat and I was able to mount and write to it with no issues but it can't handle large files so I reformatted to ext3, and this is when all the issues started.

I remember doing this once & it worked. Try this.
As root:
Where 'user' is your normal user name.

I actually read that on Ubuntu forums and did try it and it worked. That is odd behavior... I wonder why that works?