OK, about a month and a half ago now I made the switch in my household to Linux and no longer have Windows at all on any of my systems. My desktop is now loaded with Opensuse 11 and my laptop has Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy.

Anyways I have an 80gb external hd that I store music and photos on. I am able to format the drive on my laptop (Ubuntu) and it is now in the ext3 format. Once this is done I can look at the drive on my laptop but I don't seem to have any write permissions.

If I plug the drive into my desktop (Opensuse) it seems to mount but I have no read or write permissions and when I click on the drive I get a message that reads "Permissions Denied".

If I format the drive into NTFS I still have the same problems, and yes I have ntfs-3g and such installed on both of my systems.

I can't even change the read/write properties by right clicking the drive and changing them that way.

Anyone know how to fix this? I have learned tons about Linux already but there is still a few kinks I just can't figure out on my own.

All help is appreciated greatly

When you try to change permissions by right-clicking, clicking properties, are you logged in as root user? You can open a terminal/konsole and log on as root (su - in opensuse, sudo in ubuntu) and change permissions. Go to the directory where it is mounted and do this. What are you clicking on when you say 'right-clicking on the drive to change permissions'?

If you have an external drive with data you need first to create a directory and mount it on ubuntu or opensuse. Have you done this?

I can't even mount the drive in Opensuse and yes I am logged in as root under a terminal.

I just get a message that says "permissions denied" when i right click on the drive and select mount.

I don't understand your comment about being logged in as root in a terminal and getting permission denied when you right click the drive. Being logged in as root in the terminal doesn't give you root permissions if you got to the gui, only what you do in the terminal. Do you have a mount point for your drive? It's your second drive, right? Assuming that you need a mount point for your drive w/pictures and music. Call it music and do this, as root in the terminal:

mkdir /mnt/music

mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb1 /mnt/music

The mkdir line creates a mount point, the second line (mount) mounts it and it assumess this is drive two with one partition. If this is not the case it won't work so then I would suggest you run the 'fdisk -l' command as root and post that info. If the commands above give you no errors do this:

cd mnt/music/
ls -l

i had the same issue. Then i changed the owner of the media from the command line.
$>sudo chown -hR go:go /media/gogrid/

if you did not mount your media. Mount it from command line or from places. From command line with the command:

$>sudo mkdir /media/gogrid
$>sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb1 /media/gogrid

¨where gogrid is the new name for your media¨

$>sudo chown -hR go:go /media/gogrid/

done. Hope this helps.