I said it didn't have correct ownership.

The line:
drwxrwx--- 43 501 dad 1496 Dec 5 23:58 /Volumes/DVD build
shows that the top level folder on that drive is owned by a user with numerical user id = 501 and no such user exists on your machine. This is why Get Info in Finder is saying owner unknown.

So if I buy a new drive and format it I have to manually tell that drive that I am the owner, am I following this correctly?

Thank you Trevor, good of you to take the time to explain that, it makes sense now

Well, first off it is obviously nothing to do with being the legal owner of the physical object. We are talking about the Unix ownership of the files and folders on the drive.
I would assume that the user who does the formatting is assigned ownership of the toplevel folder (which is all that exists after a formatting).
When users (that user or others) create sub-folders, those sub-folders are owned by the user that created them.

Here' some interesting discoveries
ls -ld /Volumes/name_of_drive would report 'no such drive or directory' in those drives which had spaces or hyphens in their name. Those drives were the ones which had been disappearing off the DT when I tried to apply permissions or had 'owner' as 'unknown' and which would default to 'unknown' when I changed 'owner' in the finder and which would not let me apply permissions changes without reporting error 213.
From my own conclusions it seems that all along Tiger has not liked the name structure, has not even recognised it at times and I think this has been at the root of my problems.
I altered all the names of my drives to remove all spaces and hyphens and
ls -ld /Volumes/name_of_drive reports properly on them all now.
I think I might be on to it now, any more developments and I'll let you know.
What do you think?

Were you putting quotes around the names, or else escaping spaces? If you note hayne's chown and chmod commands, he was using quotes around the directory names to make them work properly:

"/Volumes/DVD build"

If you are missing those quotes, another correct way is to "escape" the spaces using the backslash, using syntax such as

/Volumes/DVD\ build

Note that before the space, there is the backslash character.

Either way above should work to get an ls of a drive with a space in the name. So, to use concrete examples,

Correct
ls -ld /Volumes/"DVD build"
ls -ld "/Volumes/DVD build"
ls -ld /Volumes/DVD\ build
ls -ld '/Volumes/DVD build'
ls -ld /Volumes/'DVD build'

Incorrect
ls -ld /Volumes/DVD build

Trevor

I copy pasted Haynes commands with quotes. Nearly got all the wrinkles out for now, last puzzle now is that Videostorage has 10.3.9 on it for emergencies, has worked up to yesterday, now a restart into Videostorage gets me the circle with the diagonal stripe, NO ACCESS, option key before startup sees the drive and startup disc in System prefs sees the drive but it's no go.
Permissions on the drive are for access to everyone to RW
Is there a command to wipe ALL permission s etc on a disc 'cause I'm sick to the teeth with this.
Peter

Sorry, it looks like my post above got mangled somewhere. I just fixed it, so I hope what I was saying now is clear.

You were speaking of how you got a 'no such drive or directory' message when entering ls -ld /Volumes/name_of_drive where there were spaces in the drive name. This is correct behavior--you need to escape spaces, or quote them. See my (reconstructed) post above.

Trevor

It makes no sense to talk about wiping out all permissions.
The commands I have given you above are the way to go.
If you are having problems with the ownership or permissions, you need to show us the results of the command:

ls -l "/Volumes/name_of_drive"
where of course you substitute the actual name of the drive for name_of_drive
(and recall from above that the command is "ell ess minus ell")

Sorry I've confused you, the names I refer to are the names on the drive icons on the DT, when I changed them to remove spaces and hyphens etc
ls ld sees reports on their ownership properly.
Is there a command to wipe ALL permission s etc on a disc 'cause I'm sick to the teeth with this. Its 1:14 am in Ireland so I'm off to sag in front of the TV for half an hour before hitting the sack.
Thank you all for your patience and determination I'm learning a lot.
Peter

Hello Hayne your post just appeared.
Here's the result of the command you just gave me

Last login: Thu Dec 8 00:33:42 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
host86-143-134-24:~ dad$ ls -l "/Volumes/Videostorage"
total 15677400
-rwxrwxrwx 1 dad dad 5094 Oct 5 2002 Log File
drwxrwxrwx 52 dad dad 1768 Nov 23 17:45 Alias Applications
-rwxrwxrwx 1 dad dad 200704 Jun 4 2003 AppleShare PDS
drwxrwxrwx 116 dad dad 3944 Sep 9 19:59 Applications
drwxrwxrwx 3 dad dad 102 Dec 2 13:21 Applications (Mac OS 9)
drwxrwxrwx 2 dad dad 68 May 24 2004 Audio Render Files
drwxrwxrwx 2 dad dad 68 Oct 11 2004 Capture Scratch
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 17287 Jun 3 2002 Contacts Export
drwxrwxrwx 3 dad dad 102 Sep 27 2003 DVD Player.app
drwxrwxrwx 3 dad dad 102 Dec 2 13:38 Desktop
lrwxrwxrwx 1 dad dad 15 Apr 17 2005 Desktop (Mac OS 9) -> /Desktop Folder
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 241664 Dec 2 15:39 Desktop DB
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 1553794 Dec 8 00:13 Desktop DF
drwxrwxrwx 21 dad dad 714 Dec 2 13:25 Desktop Folder
drwxrwxrwx 5 dad dad 170 Jan 31 2004 FCP prefs
drwxrwxrwx 5 dad dad 170 Apr 26 2005 FCP4 Book Files
drwxrwxrwx 8 dad dad 272 Jan 31 2004 Final Cut Pro Documents
-rwxrwxrwx 1 dad dad 96818 Oct 5 2002 IE Install Log File
drwxrwxrwx 7 dad dad 238 Jun 25 20:10 Incomplete
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 171 Dec 2 13:25 Installer Log File
-rwxrwxrwx 1 dad dad 1500 Sep 24 2003 InterLok Support Install Log
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 105633 Sep 12 2003 InterLok Support READ ME.pdf
-rwxrwxrwx 1 dad dad 128512 Jan 13 2004 Letterhead 2000
drwxrwxrwx 40 dad dad 1360 Apr 2 2004 Library
drwxrwxrwx 3 dad dad 102 Dec 2 13:20 Microsoft
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 38912 Aug 29 2004 Minute to Peter Rooney as 11 2
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 6463228 Feb 12 2005 NAVMac800QSFile
-rwxrwxrwx 1 dad dad 1459246 Nov 2 2002 NAV??? 7.0 QuickScan
drwxrwxrwx 2 dad dad 68 Apr 17 2005 Network
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 823808 Oct 6 2004 Norton FS Data
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 100 Sep 9 2002 Norton FS Index
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 102400 Oct 6 2004 Norton FS Volume
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 8015360 Oct 6 2004 Norton FS Volume 2
drwxrwxrwx 7 dad dad 238 Nov 26 12:24 QuickTime
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 0 Nov 6 1999 Register
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 27648 Jun 27 2002 Reply to Peter rooney as 21 6 02.doc
drwxrwxrwx 9 dad dad 306 Aug 15 2003 Snow 2001 home
drwxrwxrwx 5 dad dad 170 Apr 9 2004 System
-rwxrwxrwx 1 dad dad 272634 Dec 15 2004 TTP4 Installer Log
drwxrwxrwt 4 dad dad 136 Oct 18 10:52 Temporary Items
drwxr-xr-x 4 dad dad 136 Jun 2 2004 TheVolumeSettingsFolder
drwxr-xr-x 3 dad dad 102 Sep 10 01:51 Trash
drwxrwxr-t 6 dad dad 204 Apr 16 2004 Users
drwxr-xr-x 7 dad dad 238 Mar 9 2004 VIDEO
drwxr-xr-x 2 dad dad 68 Jan 30 2004 Video projects
-rw-r--r-- 1 dad dad 6291457276 Nov 24 14:14 Video.dmg
drwxrwxrwt 10 dad dad 340 Dec 2 18:57 Volumes
-rw-r--r-- 1 dad dad 19959888 Jan 11 2004 WORLD TRADE CENTER ALL VIDEO CLIPS OF THE DISASTER.mpg
drwxr-xr-x 21 dad dad 714 Jul 6 13:54 WW1 footage
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 1687967174 Dec 24 2004 apple_Final Cut Pro 4.5 Hd.dmg
drwxrwxrwx 4 dad dad 136 Apr 17 2005 automount
drwxrwxrwx 35 dad dad 1190 Nov 26 2004 bin
drwxrwxrwx 2 dad dad 68 Apr 17 2005 cores
drwxrwxrwx 2 dad dad 68 Apr 17 2005 dev
lrwxrwxrwx 1 dad dad 11 Apr 17 2005 etc -> private/etc
-rwxrwxrwx 1 dad dad 836 Sep 7 2003 iNode41392531
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 28160 Feb 10 2005 invoice to springboard
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 2794849 Jun 1 2003 iserror.log
lrwxrwxrwx 1 dad dad 9 Dec 2 18:55 mach -> /mach.sym
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 570256 Dec 2 18:55 mach.sym
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 3863440 Oct 10 2004 mach_kernel
drwxrwxrwx 6 dad dad 204 Dec 2 18:55 private
drwxrwxrwx 62 dad dad 2108 Dec 13 2004 sbin
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 3624 Jul 30 2002 small_grey_badge.gif
drwxrwx--- 29 dad dad 986 Dec 6 16:24 spillover
lrwxr-xr-x 1 dad dad 11 Apr 17 2005 tmp -> private/tmp
drwxr-xr-x 9 dad dad 306 Apr 13 2004 usr
lrwxr-xr-x 1 dad dad 11 Apr 17 2005 var -> private/var
host86-143-134-24:~ dad$

Well, the problem with the 10.3.9 files on that Videostorage drive is that the ownership is wrong. You didn't mention that there were system files on that drive. The files that belong to OS X need to have particular ownership & permissions.
I think it is too hard to fix up the ownership & permissions of the system files on that drive - you'd be best to back up the data files (not the system files) that you want from that drive, then erase the drive and then reinstall 10.3.9 (if you still need it - given that you have Tiger, I wouldn't bother)

And note that when you have installed OS X on a drive, you aren't supposed to go sticking other files & folders at the top level. That sort of thing is fine for your data drives, but for a system drive, you should in general not touch the top level of the drive - all of your data files on a system drive should go under your home folder.

Good morning.
The history of that drive is that it was data storage only but whenever I make a new system HD and get it working cleanly I clone it to a storage drive to have an emergency backup, it has worked fine until now. I had been hanging onto 10.3 because of all the glitches reported in Tiger especially the slew of problems around QT and this especially affects my video and DVD work.
I think your advice is correct, back-up and reinstall

You have so many drives - you should make a partition of the right size for this sort of backup and then reserve it for that use - don't put anything else on that partition.

Yep, I do that on my main boot drive, nothing in that partition but system and applications.
I'm zeroing the Videostorage drive at the moment and I hope that's the end of it. I've taken up a lot of your time and thank you, I understand a lot more now.
Peter