[Hampshire] USB hard drives in Feisty

Hi all

It seems I'm having a bit of a mare with permissions at the moment...

I've just plugged in a USB (with a healthy ext3 partition) hard drive
into Ubuntu and it's recognised it with no problems. Trouble is, it's
mounted read only and I can't see an easy way around this.

If doing it via the GUI, unmounting it works, but then it's
automatically remounted before I can do anything - and it's remounted as
read only.

I can mount it via the terminal as rw but while it accepts the mount
command:

sudo mount -o rw /dev/disk /mnt/disk

I still get a permission denied when I attempt a simple write:

uname -a > fred (assuming I'm in /mnt/disk).

I must be missing something obvious - can anyone help?

Cheers
Rob