[PLUG] Chmod questions

[John Jason Jordan]

I just came home with a new Toshiba 5.0 TB drive, which came with a
"Microsoft reserved" partition of 128MB and an NTFS partition for the
rest. Using Gparted I deleted them both, then created a new single
partition for all and formatted it ext4. 

Unfortunately, I cannot access the drive because it is owned by root
(you have to run Gparted as root). I used chown to take ownership by
jjj:jjj, and the command executed without error, but Thunar reports
that the drive is still owned by root. 

The drive will have only distros, old movies, and other non-sensitive
data, so security is not a big issue.

What have I done wrong and how can I fix it?