Changing permissions

I have an external USB 1.5Tb FreeAgent hard drive. The files on it were copied from a 500Gb Maxtor OneTouch 4 external USB drive using Mandriva 2009.1 Spring Gnome as User. However! now all the files are owned by Root. I have tried to change the owner via going into root and using /media/disk properties and it lets me drop down the owner listing and select Don but as soon as the list closes it changes back to Root. I have also tried to change the owner (while in both user and root) from a Live USB Mandriva, Mepis 7.5 and Ubuntu with the exact same results. In terminal to change the owner I used the following...
su
chown -R don /media/FreeAgent

The results were that the cursor sat blinking for several minutes and the came back to [root@localhost don]# However! nothing seems to have changed. What I need to know is how can I change all the folders and files on this drive so they have the permissions of owner = Don can write and change them.
Group = users can list them but nothing else. Any help would be appreciated thanks in advance.

 

What filesystem is being used on that drive?

Cheers.

 

NTFS-3G

 

I have no experience with NTFS, but I doubt that you can change Linux permissions on a non-Linux filesystem. If you used ext3 it wouldn't be a prob.

Cheers.

 

Thanks for your reply Rbil. I thought I had changed permissions on FAT32 and NTFS but now that I think about it I seem to remember something about NTFS-3G being something different. Anyway I guess I'll have to copy the 384Gb to another drive then reformat the 1.5 Tb to a different file system and then putting it back. That will take a couple days and I was hoping to avoid it. Well I just checked it and Windows file systems do not allow file permissions change like Linux.

 

I'm not a Windows expert, but AFAIK Windows filesystems do not have permissions that are directly comparable to Unix type permissions. From "man mount" under NTFS options:

uid=value, gid=value and umask=value
Set the file permission on the filesystem. The umask value is
given in octal. By default, the files are owned by root and not
readable by somebody else.

So mount can override the default permissions.