Hello,
I'm still a newbie to linux( always something new to learn)
I have an Acer H340 that I've modded to give me VGA output and installed Ubuntu on over a year ago and been using for a network file server but I'm looking change things up and install another distro on it, My question is I have two drives(ext3) on there that are being used for network storage/back up and wonder what is the best or proper way to deal with permissions of those drives and files when I set-up Samba again in the new distro?
Thanks to every one that takes the time to read this and many Thanks to any one that replies.

If you plan on the same user configuration as on the old system it should be a non event. If user BOB who belonged to goups A B C .... on the old system is and had access to those drives then he should on the new system.

If you are changing then I would suggest reading the man pages for chmod & chown so you can adjust as needed.

Just remember that the actual ownerships are stored numerically, see /etc/passwd for uid/gid values.
Usernames that appear in eg 'ls', are obtained in the background by calling getent().