Problem Mounting Drives

I recently (with help from a friend) installed Slackware 9.1 and Dropline Gnome. I changed permissions for my regular user so I could access my drives and not have to "su root" everytime. Here comes the problem. I can mount the drive but it changes the group and the owner to a long string of numbers when I do and when I fire up totem to tet the drive I get an error that say the device can't be read. I know that I linked it to the right drive because this doesn't happen when I am root. Could anyone give me some insight on why this is happening? Thanks for help in advance.

did you chmod the drive to let the user access the drive???

you can do this just the same as any other file or folder.

Yes, I set permissions to 777 and I added the user to the wheel group. That is why it is wierd. You would think that I would have no problems out of it but I still do. Thanks for your help. Any other suggestions?

Have you set a umask in the device entry in the fstab file?

Cheers,
cgkanchi

No, I didn't. Was I supposed too? As I am fairly new to the world of Linux is there any way can explain what a umask is or point me in the direction of a good site for it? I know that is has something to do with file permissions but that is about all I know about it. Thanks for the help so far.