If you don't write data to external harddrive as ntfs file system on debian-6.03, you can make sure about ntfs-3g package installed already. If you haven't install the ntfs-3g package, you should open your terminal and type command now.
Step 1:
$: apt-get update
Step 2: install package
$: apt-get install ntfs-3g
Step 3: Try to mount external hdd again.
$: mount /dev/sdx1 /mnt/external
Step 4: Try to write data to external hdd.