On trying to retrieve them i was told I "Do not have permission to access the files" or something along those lines.
could you give us a listing of the output of ls -l in your /mnt folder? Also, perhaps the relevant lines in your /etc/fstab file as well.
You may wish to research for supermount- IIRC Mandrake uses this to mount your floppy drive and cdrom automagically when you insert the relevant media. I had a similar problem with Mandrake 8 and had to disable supermount (that didn't actually work for me, although it did work for some people).
Ricardo