OK, I thought this would be pretty easy, but apparently, not as easy as I'd hoped. I'm sure smoeone here will get the opportunity to say "YOU IDIOT" while answering this.

A friend of mine was having a video card problem and I was going through some old PC stuff I had to put a new video card in his PC, to test and make sure that was the prob(it was). While doing this, I found an 80gig IDE hard drive, that apparently had FC5 on it. I imagine it went into the spare parts bin when I got my 250gig hard drive, which now houses Ubuntu 6.06. I thought it'd be cool to use this 80gig drive as a mass USB storage device. So to Best Buy I go, and get one of those enclosures to turn an IDE drive into a USB external drive. Its actually pretty easy if any of you ever decide to do it. The BB model was expensive as hell($50), as I see them online at Tigerdirect and Newegg all the time for $25, but I figured what the heck.

Plug the drive in, it recognizes fine. Format it in EXT 3, and it seems OK. However when trying to move files onto the drive, it says I do not have permission. So I right click the drive, Properties/Permissions tab, and its all greyed out, and I can't change them. I see no way to set this this drive so a non-root user can access it.

I'm lost.. What am I missing gurus???

Thanks
IGF

How exactly are you mounting the drive? Have you tried mounting it manually? What command are you using?

Depending on how you're mounting it, that could be the reason why it won't copy due to permission problems. Try using the 'sudo' command and that will do the trick (for now)!

Thanks for the help... I wish I could tell you what I did.

I'm not really sure what I did, but I got it to work. I first tried to partition/format the drive using QParted. Kept getting the same error the drive was protected, etc.

So I did some searching to learn a little more about FDisk. FDisk seemed to work, but then my drive was being detected on my desktop, but showing 3-4 icons on my desktop of a USB 80gig drive, which made no sense(Yes, I set it up for 1 partition). So I fdisk again, same problem. Restarted, and viola, 1 drive, 1 icon. Formatted the drive, and it now works perfectly.

IGF