I just installed linux for the first time, havent had any experience with with. I have some questions that i'd appreciate if they were anwsered. How do i access windows drives? My mouse wheel is not working, i have a Genius netscroll mouse, i go to the control center to mouse configurations, i select the mouse but it doenst seem to work, when i go there again the selected mouse is PS2 Wheel mouse, which the wheel should work. I cant select my video drive, I have a ATI radeon 9800 XT but i gives me an error if i try to load a radeon, i could only select VESA. Should i download the ATI linux drivers from ATI site? Im currently downloading the upgrades which are about 500 megs.

You might have more success if you break these request up into seperate questions. But as an effort to get you started off in the right direction. One project that will help you read NTFS partitions can be found at:

http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/index.html

It seems that the mandrake version may require a bit more work than the frdora version, but it does not look to bad.

Good luck,