First: Do NOT do recursive chowns and chmods on your system, especially against high-level directories such as /. There are uncountable system files which *have* to be owned by a certain user/daemon, and/or *have* to have certain permissions set on them, in order for the system to work. Changing your whole system over to having everything owned by your admin account, world-writable, will likely render your system non-bootable.
Second: Titanium, I assume your system has OS 9.1 and OS X installed on the same volume? When OS X is installed, it sets explicit permissions on the top of the volume (which the system calls "/") and also sets permissions on all the new files and folders it creates during the install.
The permissions that it sets on / are "1775". The last three numbers indicate what permissions are for the owner of the directory, the group that controls the directory, and finally everyone else. The owner of / is set to root and the group that is set is called "admin". The number 7 means that it is readable, writable, and executable (that is, applications can run from it). The number 5 means that it is readable and excutable, but not writable. So the "775" means that the root account can read and write to the root level of the hard drive, all accounts that are in group "admin" can read and write, and all other accounts are only able to read.
So why can't your admin user account delete stuff or move stuff that's in / (i.e. your hard drive root level)? Good question. That's where the "1" comes in. The 1 indicates that a thing called the "sticky bit" is set on that directory. This is roughly analogous to checking the little box in OS 9's File Sharing that says "don't allow users to delete or rename this item"-- in other words, while you can add new items to / and you can change the contents of items within /, you can't rename or delete the ones that already exist. So you can't move stuff away from where it already is.
Unfortunately, there is no way in Finder to see or alter the sticky bit. There are probably some third party tools out there that can manage it, but you can remove that irritating sticky bit quite easily from the Terminal command line with this command:
sudo chmod 775 /
"chmod" is the command that CHanges MODes on a file, i.e. alters its permissions. "chmod 775 /" means change the permissions on / (your root level) to 775 (no matter what it currently is). This is exactly the same as the existing permissions, minus the sticky bit.
However, because / is owned by the root account and only the owner of a file can chmod it, you have to execute the chmod with the authority level of the root account. That's what "sudo" does-- it executes whatever command follows it on the line with superuser power (that's where the "su" comes from-- DO this as Super-User). When you type this command, you will be asked to provide an admin password, and warned about the dangers of misuing "sudo". Give it your admin account password and it will execute the chmod correctly.
Then you should be able to move things in and out of the top level of your hard drive just fine.
