Many thanks think i'm on the right road now. I had permission to mount
but not r/w makes sense now.

On the filesystem point - which should one use NTFS or FAT32. NTFS is
blanked out in the Partition editor on ubuntu 8.04 but i remember
reading somewhere that one can format to NTFS using the command line.
As i understand FAT32 is simpler but restricts file size?