How to mount hard drives:
Having to mount hard drives is a big difference between Windows and Ubuntu.
The main reason is security, which is quite sensible. On Windows, anyone can take someone's hard drive and copy or move stuff from it.
You can have hard drives auto-mounted during the start-up process if you like. I won't go into that here, I'll just explain how to get the drive's partitions readable.
Each partition needs to be mounted separately, partitions can be in different file systems within the same drive.
 1. First you need to find out which cable and drive setting the relevant hard drive is attached to. This can either be done by looking at it or in the early stages of start-up or via the BIOS.
 2. Open a Terminal session, see "Opening a Terminal session".
 3. Make a directory to hold a drive's partition's contents in. See "Making a directory".
 4. You should know the file system on each partition. If not, you can detect it automatically, but that isn't very thorough.
 5. DOS and Windows does not put partition numbers in the correct order, so you might need to tweak the command below by running through the partition numbers.
 6. For the first partition in FAT32 on a Secondary Master hard drive, the command is:
			mount -t vfat /dev/hdc1 "mount directory name set by you"
    For the first partition in FAT32 on a Secondary Slave hard drive, the command is:
			mount -t vfat /dev/hdd1 "mount directory name set by you"
    For the fourth partition in FAT32 on a Secondary Slave hard drive, the command is:
			mount -t vfat /dev/hdd4 "mount directory name set by you"
    Basically, the first bit is the filesystem type ("vfat" for FAT32 or FAT16, "ext3" for Linux);
    		the second part is the drive code and partition number, the drive codes are as follows:
		"hda" for Primary Master (this could be a hard drive or CD or DVD),
		"hdb" for Primary Slave (this could be a hard drive or CD or DVD),
		"hdc" for Secondary Master (this could be a hard drive or CD or DVD),
		"hdd" for Secondary Slave (this could be a hard drive or CD or DVD).
		the partition numbers have to be experimented with. Mount the drive then look at the mount directory name set by you and see if it's the one You want.
		You'll get an error message if the partition is not the file system type You specified.
    "fd0" for floppy drive A:,
    "fd1" for floppy drive B:,
    "sda" for a single-partition USB drive (might be read only if another machine/user made all or some of it),
    CD and DVD drives can only have one partition, so they will be either "hda","hdb","hdc" or "hdd".


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------