Another how do I.... :-)

Then create a new thread you swine!

I have hooked up my Maxtor external drive to the Kubuntu box.  It's a
USB drive and has mounted etc.  Drive designation is sda1 and is
currently mounted under /media/external.  Checking as root through the
shell I can see all the files.  I ran the ls command to get that.  But
I can't access them as a normal user.  At this point I ran ls -l to
check the permissions.  Ok, it appears that root alone has read
properties:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    6 2007-09-20 18:20 cdrom -> cdrom0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2007-09-20 18:20 cdrom0
dr-x------ 1 root root 8192 2007-10-01 20:27 external
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    7 2007-09-20 18:20 floppy -> floppy0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2007-09-20 18:20 floppy0

I have tried <chmod 777 external>  this was of course while in the
/media directory as /external is within /media.

I got this:

chmod: changing permissions of `external': Read-only file system
root@kev-kubuntu-PC:/media# ls -l
total 16
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    6 2007-09-20 18:20 cdrom -> cdrom0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2007-09-20 18:20 cdrom0
dr-x------ 1 root root 8192 2007-10-01 20:27 external
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    7 2007-09-20 18:20 floppy -> floppy0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2007-09-20 18:20 floppy0

Any ideas of where I have gone wrong?  Before anybody says it yes, I
am very rusty.

By the way, the line I added in fstab is as follows:

/dev/sda1       /media/external ntfs    rw,user,noauto  0       0

I keep hearing default in my head default,rw,user,noauto but I think that's wrong?

Silly question have you tried un-mounting then remounting ("Have you tried switching it off and on again?")