new to ubuntu; have a few questions

[Oliver Doepner]

Hi!

Ownership of mounted filesystems does not only depend on the modes of 
the files and folders on that filesystem but also on the mount options.

That probably explains why the ownership was different when you mounted 
the filesystem manually as a user.

You might want to check out "man fstab" to learn about the predefined 
mounts in /etc/fstab and "man mount" for an explanation of the mount 
options.

cu
Oliver

-- 
Oliver Doepner
http://users.eastlink.ca/~odoepner/