I have a couple questions regarding mounting an external hard drive. For starters, I am running Debian Lenny with xfce4, and when I turn the drive on it is automatically mounted, shows up on the desktop, as Media-1 (I named it that in windows) but I do not have permission to access it. I can't seem to find where it gets mounted to either

From a console as su, (from trial and error) I have to umount /dev/sda1
then mount -t ntfs /dev/sda1 /Media-1
I had to chmod 777 -R /Media-1 in order to access the drive
I was also give a message that the operation was not supported on some of the files.

Eventually I'd like to create a Samba share and keep the drive plugged in, occasionally taking it with me, but for now is there a way to make the drive mount to the /Media-1 directory at boot or when I turn it on?

What should the file format be fat32 ntfs??? and what should the permissions be?

Thanks

Put a line in /etc/fstab (man fstab)
/dev/sda1 /Media-1 ntfs auto,defaults 0 0

That will mount it at boot. Then fiddle with that as you want (man fstab)

Thanks