On Jan 11, 2008 8:21 AM, Anthony Papillion <<a href="mailto:papillion@gmail.com">papillion@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> OK, so I've followed everyone's advice and I still can't get RW access to my external USB hard drive. I think the issue is that the FS was created under WinXP and is either NTFS of FAT32 (can't remember which) and that I don't 'own' the FS. So, here's another approach I'd like to take but am not sure how: how do I force Ubuntu to format the external drive as a Linux fs and take ownership of it? FYI, the drive is at /mnt/sda5 Thanks in advance, Anthony -- ubuntu-users mailing list <a href="mailto:ubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com">ubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com</a> Modify settings or unsubscribe at: <a href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users" target="_blank"> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users</a> </blockquote></div> Please, don't change the topic subject. This is confusing. Before you do this, first check what fs the drive is. Just use gparted from the live-cd. If it is ntfs, you can install ntfs-3g (sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g) in the live cd. Then you can mount the drive as rw using the filesystem ntfs-3g. /Rutger