need advice to set permisions for usb external ntfs formated hd

[Dimilion]

i have an external ntfs formated hd i want to access on my normal user acount as at the moment i can only access it from root which is not a good thing
i do not want to write to the disk only access the data on it
any help is welcome
thnx

[genesus]

If you want everyone to be able to read it then use 744, if you want read and execute access then 755. Plus you can always use sudo to write to it.

[Dimilion]

well i did try :
cmod rwx 744 755 and 777 dimilion /mnt/external -R
and i got the same result as when i previously tried an ls on that directory/hard drive :
ls /mnt/external : permission denied

nb. I am rather new to Linux so i'm not too familiar with some of the commands

thanks for the help

[bigtomrodney]

The filesystem is NTFS, it is very difficult and quite unreliable to write to NTFS. It is disabled by default. Have a look into FUSe or Captive-NTFS if you must, otherwise you may need to format in FAT32.

[Dimilion]

like i said i dont want to be able to write to the disk , all i want to do is access and execute the data that is on the disk so ....
the poblem :
/mnt/external(the usb external hd in question) is only accesible if i log in with root, when i log in with my user account created during installation whom at this stage i've added to all groups and gave as much rights as possible i get no access to the folder/drive i cant even view its contents .

what i've tried to resolve probelm :
ive done a chmod on the drive adding 744 755 and 777 to read write and execute, all with the same result: me still not being able to gain access to the drive when logged in with my normal user account, i've even tried adding rights in the kde gui all with no results .....

so if anybody who stumbles upon this thread can assist me in any way to resolve this problem i will be very gratefull ..
thanks for the replys thus far

[hchasqueira]

You can try the following (with the drive unmounted):

chmod 755 /mnt/external

edit /etc/fstab and make sure the line refering to your external drive looks like this (especially the umask part):

/dev/sda1 /mnt/external ntfs user,umask=0022,nls=iso8859-1,ro 0 0

Now mount the drive and use it as a regular user.

[Dimilion]

Thank you very much Hugo problem has been resolved