Mounting question...
 

I have on my hard drive a partition that I have not accessed in a long time, it has some old movies and things on it. It is formatted ext3 and mounts at /data. Well today I decide to go in there and clean some things out, and I find out that only root has read/write access in there. This is apparently related to my having reinstalled the OS some months ago.

So how do I change this?

since it is already mounted as rw for root. . have you tried changing the owner of the /data?

try (as root)

chown yourusername /data


i am not sure if i got the right syntax. .. update this thread of the results

When I use chown it appears that it does it to the folder but not to the contents. How would I do this recursively(is that the word)? There are many subdirectories and files in there.

you could try changing the owner and group of the drive:
right-settings are done with chmod, but its a bit difficult.

ah:i missed your both posts:
-R should take care of all Recursive files and folders.
greetings

Ah, success. chgrp was the ticket. Thanks.