O.k. so I read the difficulties with HAL and I added my user to the groups specified which allowed me to mount the drive.

But my user can only look at the files or copy them off of the drive. I can't add anything. I've even tried this as root, but to no avail. I am unsure what command(s) to run. I have some rather large files I need to transport between systems and I can't copy.

It shows my username as the owner, but no write permissions?

How can I fix this?

What file system is used on the USB drive?

Brian

Hello.
What kind of partitions do you have on your external HDD? If you have NTFS partitions, you will not be able to write them with any user.

It is NTFS
I thought Linux could handle NTFS. I guess not?
what about Fat32? If I could use something like partition magic on the drive and set up a Fat part would that work.

My understanding is that NTFS write is still very experimental and dangerous. Personally, I have split my external USB drive into 2 partitions. One is ext3 and the other is NTFS for when I connect it to Windows.

FAT32 is actually not recommended for large disks either. For example, WD recommends formatting their 500GB MyBooks with NTFS or another file system (even though they ship them as FAT32 for multi-OS compatibility).

There is an apparently stable driver at http://www.ntfs-3g.org/ which enables read-write access for NTFS.

Brian

Linux can write to NTFS with the ntfs-3g driver, you just need to make sure you're using it. That being said, I format all my external drives as FAT32 just so they'll be compatible EVERYWHERE (any linux, mac, or windows machine).

You can also format your HDD to ext2 and access it both from win and lin with full write access and support. ext2 full support is not default in windows, but if you install the fs driver, you will see the ext2 partition just as the others (FAT32, NTFS). It will have an own drive letter, just as the others. You will be able to read, write, modify files just as on other windows partitions. The ext2 fs driver can be found here:
http://www.fs-driver.org/
Download it, install it in windows, set the options (very easy), reboot to be sure, and voila: you have full access to your ext2. No need for two partitions, can use with files bigger than 4 Gb, full access from both OS.
With this tool you can also access your ext3 partition the same way, but remember: Don't write anything to your ext3 from windows, because it will not write the filesystem journal!!!
You can ask: why can ext2 fs driver handle an ext3 part? The answer is simple: ext3 is a filesystem journal enhaced ext2, so they are almost the same. The driver will handle your ext3 as an ext2, and because ext2 doesn't have a journal, win won't even try to write the journal. So, again: Never write ext3 from Windows!