Mounting External USB NTFS Drive (with Slackware 10.2\kernel 2.6.12.6)

[imac1701]

I really need some help... (sorry if this is a repeated topic, I couldn't find any results that helped me)

(If you wouldn't mind dumbing down your responses for a semi-newbie)
--
I have a 400 GB Seagate drive in an external USB case. The drive has a single NTFS partition.

To mount the drive, I do:
mkdir /mnt/ext-hdd
mount -t ntfs -o rw,user /dev/sda1 /mnt/ext-hdd

..it mounts fine (with no errors)..

When I try to read from the drive (as a non root user) I get:
ian@icm:~$ cd /mnt/ext-hdd
-bash: cd: /mnt/ext-hdd: Permission denied
ian@icm:~$

However, as root I can read all files from it.

Writing is a different story:

root@icm:/mnt/ext-hdd# echo "HELP ME PLEASE" > foo
-bash: foo: Permission denied
root@icm:/mnt/ext-hdd#

---------------------------------------------------

My goal: Make it so the drive can be read AND written to by *ALL USERS* - However, if I can only get 'root' to read\write to it, that would be fine.

~Please help me -- Thanks

[kasperlindvig]

You need to change permissions to the files and folders on the drive, so that everyone can acces it. To begin with add the usernames: guest, everyone and anonymous from xp. Give them full permissions and then you should be able to have read acces from linux. For write acces you need some special ntfs write program installed in linux. Be careful however that writing to your ntfs patition from linux will mess up your ntfs journal which causes xp to report "damaged recycle bin" and have you do full diskchecks. They do not work though and you most likely have to repartiton your drive for the error messages and strange behavior to cease in xp. If you created the ntfs partition using linux, then you should have no problem, as long as you don't access the drive from xp.