how do i get into a second hard drive on my machine? if i type /dev/hda1 (i am on hda2) i get Permission Denied. i am logged on as root so i cannot figure out how to get to my other disk. how do i change the permissions on the other drive?

Try /dev/hdb1
The first hard drive is called hda and subsequent partitions are labelled hda1, hda2 and so on.
The second hard drive is called hdb and subsequent partitions hdb1, hdb2 and so on.

You need to mount the filesystem on it with something like

# mount /dev/hdb1 -t fs_type /path/to/mountpoint,

replacing fs_type by whatever filesystem that partition is using and replacing /path/to/mountpoint with where you want to mount it to (a directory in /mnt is common). That mount point must exist before you try to mount there.

Also, before mounting it, are you sure it's not mounted already? Try running "mount" (i.e. with no arguments) to check. That will also tell you the mount point, if it is mounted.

the other drive is already mounted. i can see how much free space is on it and if i try to remount it, i get an error that its already mounted.
i am on the IDE slave drive, so this one is drive 2. the ide master is the one i need to get stuff too.
if i run 'df' i can see /dev/hda1 (free space amount) and /dev/hda2 (free space amount). if i try to just type /dev/hda1 i get permission denied. is there a way to change this from the command line? i can't find it anywhere.
this all started because my KDE 3.5 login gui freezed my mouse and keyboard, all except for ALT+F1 to log in at the command line. at which i can do anything. i just can log in to the gui for some strange reason. if i could fix that i could avoid trying to figure how to copy from one hard drive to another.

You don't just type "/dev/hda1" to access the data on that partition. When you run mount, it should tell you where that partition is mounted to. For example, this line is from my mount command:

/dev/hda1 on /mnt/windows type ntfs (ro).

It's saying that /dev/hda1 is mounted at /mnt/windows. To access the files there, I just have to cd into /mnt/windows.

Edit: not sure about the problems with KDE.

ahhh, i see now. it was already mounted but i didn't see the 'mounted as' part. cd i can now cd in /windows/c, which is the other drive. thanks.
wish i could find some help on the kde gui part. i can anything, anywhere on the system except log on to the kde 3.5 gui. i alt+f1 to the command and do anything at all on the system. very frustrating.

what do you get if you log in in the console (alt+f1) and type startx

try to see the end of the file /var/log/Xorg.0.log
maybe there is something useful there.
you can do this by typing cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log