File paths / permissions really stoopid question

[päikese]

OK, I plug in a usb harddrive, "bing" there it is on the desktop. No worries. But when I want to paste to it or delete from it I get the whole "you aint allowed cos you dont have permission" thing.
However a second harddrive plugs in fine and I have complete permissions.
I have tried all sorts of sudo chmod 777 stuff to give myself permissions (which I shouldn't have to do because its my ***** harddrive and I should automatically have permission to use it. I paid for the **** thing!)
But using /media/External HD as the path doesn't work.
So how do I find the correct path to a device and how can I have permission to use my HD automatically when it gets plugged in?
Please.
Please.
I did say it was a stupid question.

[quinnten83]

is it an ntfs, ext3 or fat32 system.
I had a similar problem, and I installed ntfs-3g and it worked. I had some more tweaking to do with things that were in the fstab, but it cleared itself out and is now working.

[päikese]

I dont know, i right clickedproperties and it was about as helpful as a rubber spanner. How can I find out? It would be so easy with xp but its too late for that now....

[hyper_ch]

sudo fdisk -l

[päikese]

Ok that worked, I now know it is /dev/sdb1 and that it is ntfs. But sudo chmod 777 /dev/sdb1 still hasn't given me the ability to write or delete to it. What do I need to do next?

[bluepowder7]

try "sudo chown -R paikese: /dev/sdb1"

[Stefanie]

sudo chown -R username:username /media/disk
sudo chmod -R 755 /media/disk

this worked for me. if your external hdd is not mounted to /media/disk but to another location you should change that of course. you can see the location in your address bar in the file browser.