After messing with the user accounts & names, I found I can't access my external drives without using sudo.

So when I access one normally with cd "/media/john/FreeAgent Drive" I receive bash: cd: /media/john/FreeAgent Drive: Permission denied

However, using sudo:

sudo cd /media/john
sudo ls -l

It gives: drwx------ 1 john john 20480 Sep 24 10:45 FreeAgent Drive/

And id returns uid=1003(john) gid=1003(john) groups=1003(john), ...

So I'm interpreting this is as "you are john, only john can access this drive, however, you cannot access this drive." I have tried sudo chown john:john "FreeAgent Drive" and sudo chmod o+rw "john/FreeAgent Drive"but I still can't access it.