I have two hard drives that were installed in a win xp box, the win xp box died, so I moved the drives to my linux box. I have figured out how to mount them, and can access the drives from any user, and remotely over my home network BUT.....

The owner / group is root and it won't let me change them, and the permissions for the drive and its sub directories are full for root, and read / execute for group and others, and it wont let me changes these either.

I have tried changing these via the gui, and command line, but it doesn't work.

Any ideas ?

You can only change them from root user. If you su to root, use "su -" (especially if SELinux is enabled). That may help.

You can also use the mount options for vfat in fstab, I seem to recall a similar issue I'd solved this way. I think umask=0000 gives 0777 permissions to everything. You can also use options uid= and gid= to change the owner and group for all files on the volume.

see manpages for mount(8) and fstab(5). Have fun.