I'm trying to change the permissions on a partition so that I can copy files to it without changing to superuser. The partition is a VFAT partition I created to share files easily between windows and Linux - it's owner is root. I changed to root, then typed "chmod 777 /winshare" and got an error message saying permission was denied, which seems odd to me, considering that when I type "ls -ld /winshare" it tells me that the owner of the directory is "root." Clearly, the owner of a directory ought to have permission to do whatever the hell he likes with it. Help?

Additionally, is there a way to change to root in X? Thanks.

There are no permission in the VFAT filesystem. You can't change the permissions if they don't exist. You will need to set things up in your /etc/fstab file so that a regular user can mount the drive. One possible way is to add this line

/dev/??? /winshare vfat noauto,user,rw 0 0

to /etc/fstab and replace the ?'s with the appropriate device and partition number. There may be other ways, but I'm 99% certain that will work.

From your user account, you will have to type:
mount /winshare

whenever you want to access it.