Hey guys, just installed ubuntu as a second OS on this windows box, and I am trying to access my files from the windows partition on the drive in Ubuntu. I can access them in root, but that does not do me much good on my regular user account.

The error I get is "You do not have the permissions necessary to view the contents of 'sda1'"

I have tried to chmod and chowner under root, and this does not help. ive also tried changing them from my user account with sudo.

I did google it first, and it seemed I needed to change the fstab file, which i tried doing, but also made no difference (which is possibly because i am using a SATA drive and all the others were for normal IDE).

Right now i am currently using the default fstab i had saved as a backup. Any ideas?

In your /etc/fstab file (open as root) you should see a line something like this:
The vfat (it could also be ntfs for Windows 2000/XP) part is the filesystem type (windows type). This is how you know which line to edit. Add to the part after that (the options) user, so it will look like this:
Your file probably won't look exactly like that, it depends on what partition your Windows is and what the options are set to. The important thing is the user option.

if it is ntfs then you might be out of luck. ntfs doesnt like linux very much.

Right so, my line looks like this now:

but still no luck what so ever, i even tried throwing an rw in there, and it made no difference.

I do find it odd that my root account can access them (or that i can get them with sudo) but i cannot just access them from the regular user account no matter what i try doing