Will no one rid me of this access denied?

You did well with swap and main partitions. From what you've said i could only guess that you're trying to create folder out of the /home/. You can't just pop the window and change permissions outside your home area as an ordinary user. First, you need to login as superuser or root. With these new powers you can modify whatever you like wherever you like. Step 1: open terminal; step 2: type su and then your root password when requested; step 3: 'mkdir whateveryouwant'; step4: easiest thing would be to give write access to just anyone by 'chmod a+rw whateveryouwant', but I would go against it. I would either create a group for that particular folder and change permissions so that group members can write to the file, or maybe, when mounting the disk (this is a backup right? were not talking about your main disk with Mandriva installed?) with uid parameter set to your user uid number and rw permissions. For further information read man chmod, man mount. When you find the information you need, you'll be able to use Debian without a problem ;-) .

If you go to www.microsoft.com you can download something called "VisDuh". It allows you (and criminal enterprises around the world) to do anything to your computer except play your CDs, watch your DVDs, or start your computer (for example, http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39283862,00.htm).

For most filesystem types, creating an entry in /etc/fstab with "noauto" and "users" parameters permits ordinary users access to mount and modify the filesystem. If you want it automatically mounted, you can add the "umask=" "user=" and "group=" parameters as well and select a user/group which will give the appropriate people the access needed. (man mount, man fstab) For some filesystems such as NTFS you need to read the latest documentation to see what the driver permits. With the older version (almost 2 years ago), only root could ever write to the filesystem because the driver was not finished and you can get data corruption. With the latest (rewritten) version (since about a year ago), you can grant write access to anyone.