I really need some help... (sorry if this is a repeated topic\if I am the 10 millionth person to post this but I couldn't find any results that helped me)

(If you wouldn't mind dumbing down your responses for a semi-newbie)
--
I have a 400 GB Seagate drive in an external USB case. The drive has a single NTFS partition.

To mount the drive, I do:
mkdir /mnt/ext-hdd
mount -t ntfs -o rw,user /dev/sda1 /mnt/ext-hdd

..it mounts fine (with no errors)..

When I try to read from the drive (as a non root user) I get:
ian@icm:~$ cd /mnt/ext-hdd
-bash: cd: /mnt/ext-hdd: Permission denied
ian@icm:~$

However, as root I can read all files from it.

Writing is a different story:

root@icm:/mnt/ext-hdd# echo "HELP ME PLEASE" > foo
-bash: foo: Permission denied
root@icm:/mnt/ext-hdd#

---------------------------------------------------

My goal: Make it so the drive can be read AND written to by *ALL USERS* - However, if I can only get 'root' to read\write to it, that would be fine.

~Please help me -- Thanks

Hi,

Even though you have the module for mounting an NTFS drive, you must also have the "write" to NTFS configured in your kernel, which is a relatively new feature in the 2.6 kernel. As far as the permissions issue, that can be solved with a chmod command to allow all users to read the mounted partition. There are articles you can find by googling, and searching this forum with "write to NTFS" search argument.

Hope this helps,

Bob