K, that's it. I backed up my important files and formatted the drive to ext3. There was a little fuss over read/write permissions, but
"chmod 777 /dev/hdc1 /mnt/ext3" ironed that out.
*NOTE* For others viewing this post, you may not want to include the "777" part of that command. Read the help file for chmod and see if another configuration suits you better. 777 Gives all users read and write privileges. This is not a problem for me, as I am the only user other than root, which is also me.