Null, it sound slike your first install went a bit pear shaped somehow.
The most usual configuration for a linux install is for your primary IDE master (hda) to be split into a windows partition and a linux partition. You install windows first, and then install linux on top of that. This is because windows always assumes it's the only OS on the system, and overwrites the master boot record (which holds your linux booter, lilo or grub). Also, there's been many tales of XP installs totally raping linux partitions when it's installed with a system that already has linux on it, so maybe another reason to be careful - more on this as it appears!
I have a 30 GB master split into windows system (5 GB), linux (5 GB) and a documents partition (18 GB). My 40 GB slave has a 500 MB linux swap folder, and the rest is all FAT32 documents. If you have two hard drives, you get a big improvement in swap speed if your swa partition is on a different hard drive from your system, and you get an even bigger performance increase if your system hard drive is the fastest in your system. The system I'm planning to build myself has a 10 GB SCSI as the OS master drive, with all my docs sitting on RAIDed Baracuda IV's
You should be able to boot linux without the floppy though - it's generally there as a last resort if you have to reinstall windows (which, like I said, assumes you're not running any other OS's and overwrites the MBR). I don't know how SuSE handles it, but Mandrake has the option to reinstall Lilo or grub in the event of a windows reinstall.
Linux can read NTFS files fine (it's quite fun to go into Windows in Linux and see just how much they try to hide from you!), it's just the writing that's a problem. But yep, there are no probs as far as FAT32 is concerned, even if it is a bit of a ****ty file format. Make sure your FAT32 drive is split into lots of partitions, else you'll have whopping 40 KB clusters or whatever, and lots of wasted space. Linux handles partitions differently to Windows, so if you have partitions as /home/null/music and /home/hull/porn and /home/null/warez, they will all just show up as different folders in your /home directory, rather than different drives as they do in windows.
As for my fave linux, I don't know really. Mandrake is OK to get a feel for the OS I suppose, but it leaves some areas sadly lacking... I find myself leaning towards redhat, but my friend says he thinks I'm ready for Debian. I've not tried SuSE yet, and user friednliness is one of the things it's noted for, but my friend told me that Mandrake was better to learn on : shrugs :
I think fave distros is just a matter of personal choice. I've met people who still use Corel, and I've met others who won't use anything less than Slackware or (gulp!) Linux from Scratch (a "build your own" distro). Though I think SuSE, Mandrake and, to a lesser extent, RedHat are better for new users looking to experiment.