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The reason I cant change owner or permissions is because even if I mount it as read and write, NTFS still stays read-only.
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True, with the native NTFS driver you can mount NTFS partitions read-only, not read-write. There are projects like Captive that provide a read-write access to NTFS partitions (don't know about Vista partitions, though), but last time I checked they weren't reliable enough. Better either use FAT drive to move files between Windows and Linux or just stick to read-only NTFS, before the NTFS read-write-driver projects evolve more.
To be able to mount partitions as root you'll probably need to add the desired user to the group
mount and probably add the desired mount entry to your
/etc/fstab file with appropriate options; this way your user(s) can mount the partition when needed, or automatically during boot, without having to become root. Using
su to become root to mount the partition, as suggested in the previous post, is not good in the long run or for multiple users, because in that case you'll need to use the root account password, which means either giving it to regular users or make other users than the root user (who's using a regular account in this case) unable to mount anything. A better way to use root permissions to do the job would be to grant specified users permissions to use
sudo which enables them to run commands as root (without root password; they'll use their own passwords instead); the good side in this is that the use can be restricted to only the mount command, or even to mount only a specified partition. If you want to use sudo, you must add the users to the sudo group (or 'sudoers', can't remember which one) and then alter
/etc/sudoers to grant the permissions. I'd probably configure
/etc/fstab myself and add the users to a group that lets them do the mounting without any root stuff, sudo or su, or if you like, configure sudo.
Additionally I recommend you to make friends with
sudo command. It is a powerful way to let regular users do stuff that needs root privileges, without giving root password to anyone, restricting the usage to the needed commands only. I'm pretty sure there are always regular users that need to do tasks that need superuser permissions, and using
su is not as good an idea as
sudo is -- root password is only one reason.
sudo also means that you won't be opening a login for root, if the program (that sudo runs) ends, sudo ends too and the user's permissions are back to normal. If you use
su instead, you might end up in a situation where root login is left open, which isn't good idea. To stay secure, first step is to try and keep root logins at minimum -- only use root account when it's really needed, not just to "make things easier". Better spend a little time with configuring the system to be easy-to-use without root permissions hazzle than use su and root logins all the time.
EDIT: fstab syntax:
That should explain enough, along with the lines that already exist in fstab. If you're unsure about the last two numbers in the line, leave them to zero; it's got to do with file system checking.
