USB mounting question

[Bart Silverstrim]

Someone asked me about this problem and I don't know if I solved it 
previously or just got lucky, because I don't seem to have the issue.

He is trying to mount a USB external drive.  It mounts (reiserfs), but 
only root can write to it, everyone else can just read.

I have two external USB drives, and my user can read and write to them. 
  I see that the /media drive has the two external USB drives (ext3) 
owned and grouped to my username as well, not root:root.

He was trying to fix it under fstab, but I thought that was deprecated 
for use with USB drives because either udev or hal or mtab worked with 
dynamic mounting of USB devices.

How can he fix the mounting so when the USB drive is mounted, it's R/W 
to his normal user instead of RO for his user and RW for his root?

-Bart