root privlages

[Advent Systems]

Hello All,
        Does anyone know why can't change the ownership of a partition 
my external USB drive from root to my user account?  The drive has (2) 
partitions on it, one is  Linux and  the other is NTFS.  I used 
DiskDrake to set the mount points.  After I rebooted both partitions 
show up in the tree.  DiskDrake initially set the ownership of the whole 
disk to root.  I was able to change ownership of the Linux partition and 
now have full read/write access to that partition.  When Try to  do the 
same with the NTFS partition  bash returns a message  "chown: changing 
ownership of `windows': Read-only file system"  and returns me to the 
prompt.  I know I can't write to the NTFS partition but I would like to 
brows the partition and take copys of files off it.  I have been able to 
do this with (2) of my other NTFS partitions that are on  my  internal  
hard disk.
     The drive is a BuslinkUSB2 external, my os is Mandrake 9.1.3, 
kernel is 2.4.21-0.13mdk, all the windows partitions are NTFS.

Thanks,
Bob Randal