No write access unless mounted in my $ folder

[jreidy]

I have a second harddrive which has a desktop icon and is mounted at /media/sdb1
I also have an external drive which I connect from time to time which is /media/sdc1, 2 and 3 respectively (it's partitioned)

I can never write to the harddrive, unless I mount it in my home directory.

I can never mount the external usb drive (NTFS, Fat32, Fat32). I am not interested the NTFS partition for now.

I have tried changing the permissions through the gui and the terminal. The Harddrive is root group, jreidy user - so it should work.

Can anyone help?

Regards,
Jreidy

<edit> By the way, I have spent the day searching here and at linuxquestions.org and have tried the suggestions made in similar threads. I realize this is a common question but the typical solutions didn't work for me. </edit>

[SiKing]

Right click on the desktop icon and select "mount". What happens?
Right click on the desktop icon again, and select "change read/write mode", it should ask you if you want to make the disk writeable. What happens?
Try writing something (even 'touch something') at /media/<partition>. What happens?

[jreidy]

I've actually wiped the system now, so I can't check unfortunately. Thanks though!