Hi all.
I've installed Ubuntu 7.04 on my C:\ drive. There is no other OS on that drive.

On what would have been my D:\ drive there are documents of all descriptions which were created when the machine was a Windows XP machine. I want to delete most of these files but Ubuntu won't let me.

The procedure I'm following is as follows,
* I single left click on the folder or file that I want to delete.
* I press the [Del] key on the keyboard.
* I get a message "Cannot move file to the Deleted Items folder, do you want to delete it permanently?"
*I mouse click the on-screen "Delete" button.
This brings up an on-screen message "Error wile deleting <filename> cannot be deleted because it is on a read-only disk."

If I right-click on a folder that I wish to delete and select "Properties" then select the Permissions" tab, all the options are greyed out. At the bottom of the box is the message "You are not the owner, so you can't change these permissions".

Grateful for any advice as to how to permit myself to delete these files.

Thanks,
Gwynn

Your filesystem on that disk/partition is probably ntfs and it's more than likely mounted read-only.

There is a 'tool' (it's called ntfs-3g) that you can install and will allow you to read/write ntfs partitions. I've never used it however, so not sure how it works

As an alternative, make a backup of the disk/partition, reformat it as ext3, reiser or whatever and place the documents that you want to keep back. For a Linux-only system that would have my preference.

Open a terminal and go to the /mnt folder:
cd /mnt
ls
You should see some pre-set mount points for the various partitions---one of these will be for the "D Drive". You should be able to mount it using:
mount <mountpoint>
Then, cd <mountpoint> and ls to see what's there.

Once you find the files, do ls -l to see owner and permission.

At least on my system, I cannot directly change owner and permissions for NTFS files. You may have to simply delete the files as root. (su to become root)

Hi there. Thanks for that.
How do I open a terminal? This is all very VERY new to me.
Gwynn.

Applications > Accessories > Terminal

Thanks for that. This is all new to me. :-)