For some reason I cannot access an external USB harddrive. Whenever I click on my computer the hard drive is recognized but whenever I click on the hard drive icon it doesnt let me open the hard drive.

I had SUSE linux 9.1 installed before and I never had that problem with the two external hard drives that I own. I had to do a fresh install of the SUSE 9.1 and now I cant access them.

How do I let my user account be allowed to access the drive?

Posting the output of fstab and the permissions on your USB devices would help us:

cat /etc/fstab

ls -l /dev/sd*
(it could be named under hd*. any help there? i'm sure you know which to use)

I remember there was a problem with hotplug in 9.1. Make sure you have all updates installed. If it still refuses access, you may need to switch-off submount:
http://portal.suse.com/sdb/en/2004/0...rom_subfs.html

here is my fstab information:

tlaloc@rn103188:~> cat /etc/fstab
/dev/hda2 / reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 1
/dev/hda1 swap swap pri=42 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs noauto 0 0
/dev/cdrecorder /media/cdrecorder subfs fs=cdfss,ro,procuid,nosuid,nodev,exec,iocharset=utf8 0 0
tlaloc@rn103188:~>


I noticed that whenever I tried to access /etc/fstab I wasnt able to even if I was the root user, why is that?

rn103188:/home/tlaloc # /etc/fstab
bash: /etc/fstab: Permission denied
rn103188:/home/tlaloc #

did you looked inside ../media ...?

/etc/fstab is not a command, so it needs to be opened with some kind of editor/viewer. Try 'pico /etc/fstab' as root.