i have installed linux susse 9.0 on a 20gb hdd and i have a 40gb hdd with a fat32 file system.no os on it just full of mp3s and video clip.the problem is hoe do i make the hdd available on linux...i tried but linux tried to partition it again..what should i do

"dmesg" and "fdisk -l" are your friends for finding out the drive's name. It'll probalby come out as something like /dev/hdb1

Then you just need a mount-point. Create a directory in /mnt such as "fat", and then run:

mount -t fat /dev/hdb1 /mnt/fat

You'll need to be root to do this until you set the /etc/fstab entry to allow normal users to mount it.

where do i create a directory?

You need to be root, then create the directory where your FAT disk will be mounted, then mount the disk, then you can access the files on it.

Try this code:

su -
give the root password
md /mnt/fat
mount -t fat /dev/hdb1 /mnt/fat
cd /mnt/fat
ls

If you can now see your files, all is well and you should do as oneandoneis2 suggests and create an entry in /etc/fstab so normal users can access the disk. The entry will probably look like this:

/dev/hda1 /mnt/fat fat iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0

When you reboot, the disk will be mounted automatically for you, and you can access it as a normal user.