How do you become the administrator? I have searched everywhere...I type in the root password, but all that does is let me into the Control Panel. I need administrative access. I am the owner, but it says I'm not. I gave myself all groups, but I still can't do what I need to do. BTW, I have Mandrake 9.1

Typing "su -" into a console will let you become root for that session.

There ARE threads on this. Searching "administrator" will give you results, as I answered one two days ago.

On mandrake 9.1...

Type su at the prompt.
Enter password.
type drakconf
Now you should be able to do whatever you want.

What do you need to do that you cannot?

FYI: Administrator is out
root is in

Cool

I tried typing su into the console, along with the password and nada,

root@localhost michael]# su
> I did type in the password, but nothing confirmed

[root@localhost michael]# drakconf
[root@localhost michael]# su
[root@localhost michael]# /dev/hda0
bash: /dev/hda0: No such file or directory
[root@localhost michael]# /dev/hda1
bash: /dev/hda1: Permission denied

This says you were already root when you entered su....

type "exit" or "su <username>" to go back to your regular account. The prompt should begin with <username>.
Switching to root should go thusly:
mherring@1[~]$ su
Password:
root@1[mherring]# ("root" at the beginning---and "#" instead of "$"---says that su was successful)

the problem is you can't just type in /dev/hda1
if you want to access that directory you need to do

You don't cd into files. You'd need to mount the partition first and then cd to wherever you mounted it.

Well, lets clear the things a bit:
1) "/dev/hda1" is the device file corresponding to your first hard drive partition. This is the file, from which you can get your partition content in raw form, byte by byte. It's not a directory, to where you can "cd" (ChangeDirectory, BTW, this is where the command came from). It's also not a program, which can be run. So, being not a program, it is not marked with the "x" permission bit. You probably know, in linux, the executables are not marked with the ".exe" extension, rather they are marked with the "execute" permission bit. Since "/dev/hda1" does not have execution permissions set, the shell gives an error "Permission denied".Anyway, typing "/dev/hda1" at the prompt is senseless.
2) Becoming an administrator: as you probably know, each file and process have user and group associated (well, I'm simplifying a little here). If the process permissions match those of a file, the process has access to the file. To be an administrator, means runnin g a process, with the user "root" (UID=0 (UserID)) which is a special privileged user, that has access to all the system. Usually, a process inherits the permissions of its parent process. So, if you started a shell as root, the commands that you execute within this shell also have root privileges. The command "su", is of a type so called "SetUID" program - it executes as root regardless to which user belongs the process who invoked it. So, "su" checks your password, and if it matches, "su" - running as root, starts new shell process, also running as root. And the commands which you type in the shell running as root, also execute as root - as example - "drakconf". You can also run gui programs that way, however, it's better to use another "su"-like program, specially for GUI programs. Under KDE, eg., it's called "kdesu". For example, on my desktop, I have a shortcut to command "kdesu -c konqueror", which asks me for the root password and then starts the file manager as administrator with access to all files in the system, similarly to the WinNT's "Run as ...".
3) BTW, I'm also on Mandriva (started with 10.1, upgraded through 10.2, 2006, 2007.0. As mentioned above, with default config, the "#" prompt indicates that you are already root. The regular users prompt is "$". Typing "drakconf" at "$" prompt won't work, but at "#" is fine. "drakconf" is the Madriva's (ex Mandrake) control panel, and in order to have write access to the files containing system-wide settings, it must be run as root.

Ok that sounds good I'll give a try and see if I can find the raw data, with this infomation I should be able to partition the hd - rite? We shall see. I'm also reading the linux bible to get more understanding.
Thank you for your reply

Your hard disk will have at least one partition on it already, obviously. You can run "fdisk -l" (that's a lowercase L) to list all the partitions on all disks (or "fdisk -l /dev/hda" to list the partitions on /dev/hda). If you want to shrink/expand/move an existing partition to create free space, you'll need to use something like Parted.

I was wondering do the upgrades load automatically over writing like windows or add another folder like mac? Are they available. I did try downloading mandrivia spring from their website, but got nothing.

Downloading is downloading and is not the same as installing. So you downloaded a file. Remember the filename and search for it. Alternatively (if you used a browser), check where the browser by default stores downloaded files.