I have been using Mandrake for about three months. I have a separate hard drive that is running XP. I can mount the drive in the terminal, but when I try to open K-diskfree on the desktop and open the drive in file manager I get a message stating I do not have permission to access the files. As a root user in the terminal I can see the files, but I cannot move the files to my user desktop to manipulate them. I am still getting used to using the cmd more frequently. I use the GUI for about 60% of what I do. I am not sure if I need to do some kind of chmod to access the drive or what. Any help will be appreciated.

You can only read/copy NTFS files. You cannot move or cut/paste or write NTFS files. If you want to do that you would use http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/

ok, so you have entries in your /etc/fstab for the ntfs partition right?
Mine looks like this:
/dev/hdb1 /mnt/hdb1 ntfs ro,user,noauto,umask=002 0 0

the two important parts are:
'user' , so you dont have to be root to mount the partition,
and
'umask', because the ntfs driver expects only root to use it (i think)

either way ... works for me.