How do I change the permission of a mounted HDD?
 

I am attempting to create a directory on a USB HDD I recently mounted.

However, only root can access this drive. I've checked the permissions, and I need to know how to open access. How do I change the permissions?

as root, create a directory. Then,
chown -R username directoryname
will change the user ownership of the directory.
chgrp -R groupname directoryname
You can change the write privileges to allow anyone to write to it by
chmod 777 directoryname
There are lots of tutorials on chmod that will provide details on how to use it.
Cheers

what distro are you using - the tag on this is debian is that what you are running ?
the chown command might not do anything IF it is being mounted as r/w for root only and read only for a normal user
that is the most likely if it is auto mounted
if you mounted it in "fstab" then that will need changing .

Try to mount the device as a regular user with kwikdisk, then it should be writeable to that user (if mounted at all). Recent distro's do an excellent job on auto-mounting USB devices - I wonder why that isn't working on your Linux box.

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