Accessing partitions as user

[Harold Michels]

I want to be able to access my extra hard drive partitions as user so I 
can back things up, or whatever else I want to so. I am running a 
standalone workstation.

I have a partition on my primary hard drive. I have two partitions on a 
USB hard drive.
When I connect the USB, or boot with it connected I have an icon on the 
Desktop for each partition. I can as user mount the drives and then 
access the data on as read only. I can copy data from the mounted drive.

I can store files on the mounted drive as SuperUser and then delete 
them. I dismounted the drives and then as SU ran the following session:


[root at localhost ~]# mount -t ext3 -o uid=501,gid=501 /dev/sda1 /home/koder/Desktop/sda1
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda1,
       missing codepage or other error
       In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
       dmesg | tail  or so

[root at localhost ~]# dmesg | tail
ide: failed opcode was: 0xb0
hde: drive_cmd: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hde: drive_cmd: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }
ide: failed opcode was: 0xb0
eth0: no IPv6 routers present
kjournald starting.  Commit interval 5 seconds
EXT3 FS on sda1, internal journal
EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
SELinux: initialized (dev sda1, type ext3), uses xattr
EXT3-fs: Unrecognized mount option "uid=501" or missing value

501 is the UID that is displayed in the Users and Group utility. I have 
been editing the file in the past and have changed my logon name and 
password as well as the group name. The change seemed to go well with 
only a couple of apps complaining and I was able to resolve them.

Am I using a reasonable procedure for accessing the drives? Is it 
possible that I have corrupted something in Groups and Users? I have 
tried several other methods with no positive results and am running out 
of ideas.

Harold