local non-admin account cannot write to several external hard drives

I have a non-admin user who needs to write to different external hard drives all the time. Yes, I can give the user security rights on the external hard drive individually. However, the user will need me to do this everytime unless I give the user admin rights. This is not an option.

So far I have tried the following and have failed:

-removed the user from everyone group (assuming the user was inheriting a right that was preventing him from writing the external hard drive)
-added the user to the power users group
-added the user to secpol.msc > local policies > User Rights Assignments > Take ownership of files or other objects (i believe this would work for interal files but not external files such as external hard drives)

any suggestion is much appreciated.

Thanks,

In as a few words possilbe, the users needs the ability to take ownership of files/folders on an external hard drive in order to write to it

First I gave the user ability to 'Take ownership of Files/folders' by doing the following:

start > run > secpol.msc > local policies > user rights assignment > 'Take ownership of files or other objects'

*add the user

. . . not done yet because this only gives the user the ability to 'Take ownership of files or other objects' . . . it doesn't give the user the ability to write to the external drive

*also, since there are ton of steps involved in taking ownership I wanted to make it simple for the user to do this . . . so I installed a registry hack found online to give the user 'Take ownership' option in the right-click > properties menu

*installed the registry hack to give the user the ability to take ownership of 'files and folder' --

. . . explained to user to create folder, then take ownership through the new option added in the prperties menu, then write files/folders to the external hard drive in the newly created folder

Done. This takes admin out of the equation and allows me to maintain strict IT policy of not giving the user admin rights.