You have my sympathy, Floydking1: I've tried to resolve this problem on Ubuntu 'Lucid' (ext4fs), Debian 'Lenny' (ext3fs), & PCLinuxOS (ext?fs), on GNOME, XFCE & LXDE, whether as root/SU or not, so I don't think it's related to a conflict between vFAT/DOSfs & ext4fs. All help would be gratefully received given that I too have tried all that written above and have the same feelings about being signed in as root for what would occasionally be a considerable amount of time.

If I cannot do this then I shall simply have install a more reliable, less arbitrary distro.

Mint is without doubt a great distro, but I need to back things up from it without wasting many, many frustrating and frustrated hours. I am also running Suse 11.3 and Fedora 13 on other boxes and this never occurs on either of those distros while using exactly the same external drives. Everything has been tried with the exception of reformatting which I wish to avoid as my drive contains more than 400 gigs of information. My external drives no matter whether 500 gig external or USB key allow me read/write permissions completely arbitrarily. Floydking1 wrote:I find myself in exactly the same position.

Locking external hard drive