I'm rather new to Linux and installed Ubuntu today. Well, my problem is that I don't have a root account-I wasn't prompted for creating one during installation, I have only a user account. So I can't mount the FAT32-drive with an assload of files I really don't wanna loose, besides having other problems.
Could anyone please help me access my beloved precious files?

'course you can. Open a terminal, su, then mount
Your user password is what it wants.

They may even have a root terminal - can't remember. These sort of issues gave me the shits so much I trashed it, and put Mepis on (Win98 replacement box for my lady).

well, it ain't that easy, mounting won't work
I only get a complaint about not being the root and I don't even have a root account on the startup screen, that's the problem. I only get that single lonely user
I tried an old SuSe version some years ago for some days and didn't have that problem.
Perhaps it's an Ubuntu-issue or am I just too stupid?

EDIT:
I did as you suggested, there was a root terminal and I successfully mounted the drive.
Thanks for your quick help, echt leiwand!

Ubuntu disables the standard root account. If you don't want to use sudo, you can type in "sudo passwd root" and it will set up a standard root account. By the "startup screen" I'm assuming you mean GDM? Your graphical login? It does not allow root login by default anyway, whether the account is there or not. You have to configure it to allow that (though it's not really the wisest thing to do.. it's disabled from there for a good reason, that reason being that you really should never need to log into the graphical environment as root, better ways to do things than that).

In summary, not having a root account is done *on purpose* in Ubuntu. It's not a problem or a bug, they're just doing the best they can to keep people from wandering around in the wild using root.

Yes I know - didn't suite the way I work, so they lost a (potential) convert.
Some you win, some you don't .....

So, the way you work.. hopefully it's not by hanging around as root all the time, or is typing sudo passwd root that much of a hassle to enable the root account?