Fedora 9 and a maxtor 500gb external

It seems i cant get the hd to initialize (not sure if thats the correct word for it) until I log in as root. I can see the icon on the desktop for it and everything, but when i double click on the icon nothing happens. It also doesnt appear in /media/. If I log out of the user account and log into root, all of the sudden i can open the icon in both root AND the user account. It also shows up in /media/. I'm not sure if its a permissions issue or something else. I'm fairly new to linux so I dont know what logs to post that would be helpfull so please let me know.

thanks!

ps: using ssh to log into root from another machine makes no difference though, only using X or whatever its called from the physical machine.

A little homework

You can find and read the man pages and guides to chown before using it to make the HDD part of another user account. You can also look at chmod with some benefit. There are many google posts for each, some with better explanations and examples than others. Good Luck

http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/cmd/...p?path=c/chown