Newbie needs help with Ubuntu 5.04

[OldSeaDog]

I have been driving myself nuts trying to mount my ntfs filesystems and reading the results. I have installed about 5 times already and every time there is a screwup with the root account. I thought it was installed with out a password, but I couldn't get access. I finally got in got to the root terminal and mounted the partition manually. Now I can't get access to the mnt directory! Di I have to chmod to allow access to users (i.e. me)?

[A-Wing]

Without realising it you have created 2 questions here. Ubuntu does not come with a root account by default, the Ubuntu FAQ will explain this better than I can but you need to do something along the lines of "sudo passwd root" to enable it.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RootSudo

When you mount an NTFS partition by default only root can read it, you need to setup user/group permissions with the mount command if you want others to use it. The following should help:
http://www.linuxforum.com/linux_tutorials/1/1.php