I'll first ask, then I'll explain.

I want to get a 2nd reiser hard-drive to mount with permissions of 777. The owner can be root or the user.

My ultimate goal is to mount my drive to the directory that VMware uses to store it's guest machines (/var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines). I was able to mount the drive just fine by using this line in my fstab:
I've tried it with several umask (umask=000) options, but when they are added I get an options error. VMware is not accepting the default permissions.

I can use a different filesystem, but I don't know why that would matter. PS I am running on Debian Testing.

umask is only for newly created files...
go to the mount point of your 2nd hdd and do
chmod u+rwx,g+rwxs,o+rwx /path/to/where/2nd-hdd/is/mounted (e.g. /home/foo/fibble/vmware if you ran
mount /dev/hdb1 /home/foo/fibble/vmware

That seems to have worked. I didn't think that it would keep those permissions after the drive was remounted.