can someone help me with this little problem?

i have a maxtor 200GB external hard drive connected to my pc

with my root user i can read the files that are there
but if i try to change them or delete them
a error message pops up that says im not the owner of the disk.
i dont understand what the problem could be.
it worked great in windows.
but now that im using mandriva linux 2006 powerpack+
i don`t have any control over the HD..

ps. with my other users i can`t do anything. not even view the files.
and i don`t whant to lose the files that i allready have there..

What type of partition is on the external disk? If it is NTFS then Linux will usually mount it read-only by default. Note that there is a good reason for that. If you force Linux to mount an NTFS partition as read-write and if you then do a lot of file creates or file deletes on an NTFS partition from Linux you can trash the NTFS file system.

yes it is a NTFS partition on the disk...
do you know how i could fix this without loosing any of the files???
because i don`t have enough disk space on internal disk to store all my files...

You can only reliably use an NTFS partition in read-only mode in Linux. The NTFS file system driver is being actively developed but the web page says that it still needs more work.

If the external disk is empty then you can reformat the partition and create a file system that Linux can use, such as ext2, Reiserfs, XFS, or something like that. Some Linux distributions such as Novell SuSE come with GUI tools that make this easy. On the other hand it is also easy to do by hand, especially if you aleady know how to do it in MS-DOS or in a Windows command line window. Here are the basic steps.

1) Make sure that the partition(s) on the disk is/are not mounted anywhere.
2) Use fdisk to see how Linux has mapped the disk to a node in the /dev directory.
3) Use cfdisk, yes cfdisk, to recreate the partition table on the disk. Use the information from the fdisk -l to select the disk when you run cfdisk. For example if fdisk -l showed you that your external disk is mapped to /dev/sda then you would invoke cfdisk as follows.
4) Delete the existing partition. Create a new partition. Make it type 83. Write the partition table to disk. Exit cfdisk.

5) Now back at the command prompt run fdisk -l again. It should show your external disk with a partition of type 83.
6) Now you can create a file system in this disk partition. Let's say that your disk partition is at /dev/sda1 and that you want to create a Reiserfs file system.
7) Now you can mount your partition. Let's say that you want to mount it to the already existing directory at /mnt/tmp.
8) If you have automounting enabled then you will want to edit your /etc/fstab file to allow this disk partition to be automatically mounted whenever you plug it into the computer. Add the following line in your /etc/fstab file.
That should do it. Now you have a disk that Linux can use.

so the only way i can write on the HD is to reformat it ?
and insert another filesystem?

well well... thanks for the help

btw, do you know of ant torrent programs i can use on mandriva linux powerpack+2006

I've never used any torrent programs. All I know is that KDE has ktorrent.