On Mon, 23 Jan 2012 20:04:24 -0000 (GMT), Ted.Harding@wlandres.net said:
so it is (allegedly) mounted rw, and with FS type NTFS,
I haven't used NTFS in a decade, but do you have a kernel that has the capability to write NTFS? For a long time, NTFS was read-only on Linux. Do you even need to use NTFS? If it were me, I'd backup any data already on there that I needed, and reformat as ext3.
One other test you could try, as root:
# touch /mnt/xyz
...and see if you can create a file.