Changing ownership of an entire volume (Slack 12)
 

I have a 60gb laptop hard drive plugged into my box via USB. Every time I mount it, it comes up owned by root; so, in my normal X session I can't read, write, or execute anything on it.

I have tried chowning and chmoding it, with limited success. At best, I can at least see most of what's there- nothing more. Tried editing fstab and different mount options, and I still can't get anywhere.

Any ideas?

Have a look at this. http://slackwiki.org/Windows_Partitions

Open terminal, launch "man mount" and read it.
Filesystems for windows partitions have options which define owners of volume, as well as access rights. Those flags are not set in your case, or set to incorrect values.