Hi Peter How are you going with your problem? I do not have Ubuntu here and do not know how it handles auto mounting so I hoped someone better informed about that than me would help you. Anyway I will try to give you a solution that avoids dealing with the automount. The following assumes that 1) Nothing has changed since your previous message. 2) You are the only user on your system. If these assumptions are untrue, the following may be misleading. Also the following is untested, so use at your own risk. But there's not much risk if you haven't been able to save anything useful on the disk yet. With the drive connected, I imagine you will currently see something like this: $ ls -l /media/5a1069e0-28e6-485b-bb23-9bb6eb81f2ae drwx------. 2 root root 16384 2010-06-20 17:14 lost+found -rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 4096 2011-02-20 17:20 whimp.aup The permissions on lost+found might be different depending on if you have changed them with previous attempts. It is a system directory only used if the filesystem develops errors. Assuming you are the only user on this system, I imagine what you want to achieve is something like this: $ ls -l /media/5a1069e0-28e6-485b-bb23-9bb6eb81f2ae drwx------. 2 root root 16384 2010-06-20 17:14 lost+found -rw-rw----. 1 peter peter 4096 2011-02-20 17:20 any_file_you_put_there drwxrwx---. 2 peter peter 4096 2011-02-20 17:20 any_subdirectory_you_put_there Assuming that nothing has changed since your previous message, and in particular that there are no subdirectories on the drive yet, you can achieve that with this sequence of commands: $ sudo chown -Rc peter:peter /media/5a1069e0-28e6-485b-bb23-9bb6eb81f2ae $ sudo chmod -c 660 /media/5a1069e0-28e6-485b-bb23-9bb6eb81f2ae/any_file_you_put_there $ sudo chmod -c 770 /media/5a1069e0-28e6-485b-bb23-9bb6eb81f2ae/any_subdirectory_you_put_there $ sudo chown -c root:root /media/5a1069e0-28e6-485b-bb23-9bb6eb81f2ae/lost+found $ sudo chmod -c 700 /media/5a1069e0-28e6-485b-bb23-9bb6eb81f2ae/lost+found There are 5 single-line commands, so eliminate any extra linewrap introduced by email. Where I have written any_file_you_put_there, you can either specify the name exactly or use a glob that matches only files. Same for subdirectories, if any. If there are none, skip that command. To save typing, press tab key after /media/5a and it should automatically expand to /media/5a1069e0-28e6-485b-bb23-9bb6eb81f2ae Hopefully that will achieve what you need. How things go after that will depend on the automount umask, hopefully its default will be suitable. When you have it working, or have further problems, please show us the output of: $ umask $ ls -lR /media/5a1069e0-28e6-485b-bb23-9bb6eb81f2ae There is a little bit of info here: http://ubuntugenius.wordpress.com/2012/06/07/ubuntu-hardware-permissions-how... If you do some google research yourself, which I'd recommend, you can ignore the extra issues of vfat or ntfs filesystems, because you have chosen to format your drive as ext2 which directly implements unix permissions. Personally, I think ext3 or ext4 would be a more suitable and modern choice for an external usb backup hard drive. Also, please do not ask questions and then disappear without giving feedback to people who try to assist you. Hope this helps.