[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

From this note at the link above :

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usually when you can't mount a fat16 or fat32 drive read/write it's because there's errors on the drive. try running dosfsck on it and see if it works normally after that.

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You might see what dosfsck does for you also....

[expat_panama]

Now it looks like the problem problem has to do with my mountpoint, because getting the drive mounted is easy but it just won't stay mounted.  Like, in windows all I do is connect up the cables and when I boot the drive shows up with a letter assigned and everything.  With Ubuntu 8.10, every time I start it up I have to click on Places/970gb/mount first and that's when I can get at the files.

Thanks for the info; the forum you turned me on to has lots of good stuff on 'sudo' and 'chmod'.  I'll try and enter in all kinds of experimental commands and see what happens --after all, how much harm could I possibly do to the data?