OK, I have spent a long while today to come to a solution!
I have my partition mounted and now read & writeable.
I am using Mint and this partition is on same hdd as / & /home, my other (2) partitions.
My question is which is the most secure and safe, chown or chmod or umask, and now this sticky bit thing (will read more).
Mounting partitions and other hdd's hap-hazard is one thing, but making them secure is a must.
This is for all that follow...your thoughts?

You forgot to include the most important info: What are you actually trying to do? The most secure what for which purpose?

Oh, and by the way, welcome to LQ!

Just stay focused on what you are trying to prevent: "a file-access request, by someone, which is replied-to with YES when you want the answer to be NO."

Let's look at the operating system features which are now on the table ...

• chown controls the "owner" and "group-name" fields, which are ...
• ... used by the rwxr-xr-x "file permission mask" which is determined by chmod
• umask simply specifies the default umask permissions mask.

... all of which might well be superseded by access control lists (ACLs).

Therefore, approach the problem this way:

1. What aspects characterize the requests that you do not want to be honored? Versus, what characterizes a request that you do?
2. Given that you have both the permissions-mask and ACLs at your disposal, what's the most effective way to tell the operating system what you want it to do?

Update, (be it a slow response).
Below I will have what I have done & a snippet from my fstab file, but 1st.

My Process may not have been optimal but it worked for me.
After I was done, I had a few lingering things in my head...see my 1st post.

This was just for home use so no big issues.
To TobiSGD point, my question was aimed more for a business environment.
I was just looking for a more rounded understanding of how all these different
controls can affect security and other things.

Sundialsvcs, I have read your reply (?) many times and this is showing me that my lack of
understanding how these "permissions-mask and ACLs" work together is a problem.

I usually like to open things up minimal, or give just what is needed and works & no more until needed.
So here is what I did and what I have.

|- I made a directory in my user </home/krp/My-DATA>
| - drwxr-xr-x 2 krp krp 4096 2012-07-15 13:34 My-DATA
|- my final fstab
| - # mount "my-data" partition in, home folder "my-data"
| - UUID=587e352e-fc30-4aab-bb38-ce8299f68406 /home/krp/My-DATA ext3 rw,user,exec 0 0
| - # /dev/sda4 /home/krp/My-DATA ext3 rw,user,exec 0 0
|- I used gparted in MINT to get the UUID
|- my now mounted partition directory </home/krp/My-DATA>
| - drwxr-xr-x 23 krp krp 4096 2012-08-11 19:30 My-DATA
| - the 1st time I mounted the drive I ran chown to change the user:group
| - I then touched a file to see if writeable
| - I restarted and confirmed read & write
|
|- I use, sudo umount /dev/sda4 to unmount
|- I use, sudo mount -a to rerun fstab
| - if I unmount, modify fstab, and want to remount

Questions:
- how do ACL's fit in here?
- With this mount I get an icon on desktop, how not to have this icon with the mount?

Sorry for the long post!