I just did. The machine sees all three drives: 2 SATA which it sees and can open but knows nothing about (size, type, etc.) and one IDE drive which it sees the name of but cannot mount and also knows nothing about.

Just so you know I'm not a complete ID10T... I've been building my own workstations for music & video for 15+ years and have a fairly solid grasp of Windows.

Forgive me but, it seems a little short-sighted to me for a system that is trying to gain a foothold in the market to be so difficult to "mount" drives partitioned with the OS that is in the widest use?!? Just sayin'...

The original problem remains.

This I did, ntfs-3g is installed as are all the other cross platform apps... still not mounting

You are forgiven.

The frustrating thing about Linux is that there are so many distributions AND each team that creates a distribution puts what they want to see into their product. That is why it is important to establish which distribution you are using when you ask a question. Different distributions work differently.

You have established that your system has the driver (ntfs-3g) to read the XP file system (NTFS).

How do you know that your Linux system sees the data drives? Exactly what method did you use to determine this?

I also tried a force mount from the command terminal and it responded... mount: only root can do that

Yes that is normally the case.

How do you know what to mount? Did you run fdisk -l in a terminal window?

I opened, what I interpreted to be, the Linux version of "my computer"... it lists all 3 drives, 2 by the name I gave them when I created them in Win XP and the third which is brand new is simply "Filesystem" which I guess is the default?!?

The program Studio 64 seems to run under Ubuntu and also the GNOME desktop environment

Normally Ubuntu will mount a disk partition on demand. If you can see the disk partition you may be able to mount it simply by clicking on it in the window that you are using to see it.

Is there a step by step process that I can follow to manually mount these drives? Details please.

We're doing it.

Gnome adds a lot of functionality that is not available on the command line.

What happens when you click on the icons for the NTFS partitions?

I think op needs to add username to /etc/groups or use gui Users & Groups to modify under System>>Administration>>Users & Groups.

Where???

I go to the main menu, select Places then Computer... it shows me the three drive names... that is all.
I can open the 2 SATA drives by clicking on them.
The IDE gives me a "cannot mount drive" error

Okay. That is the correct procedure. Evidently Linux doesn't like the IDE drive.

Open a terminal window and enter the following command. Post the results.

Ok, I'm there. I see my name, login name and home directory allong with the "roots"

(baby steps... baby steps)

That thru up an impressive amount od data... is there something in particular you were hoping/looking for?

Yes but I don't know if the IDE drive is connected via an internal cable or an external USB adapter. What I was thinking was that if the drive was connected via an external USB cable then there should be some messages about it in the dmesg buffer. Now I realize that we don't know what the device name is so we don't know what to look for. I thought that we might see something like "I/O error" when the disk is attached after Linux is running.

Can you check the jumpers on the IDE drive to ensure that the Master/Slave/Cable Select are properly set? Some drives, like Maxtor, prefer Cable Select while others prefer the Master/Slave settings.