A quickie lesson in mounting – If I have an old linux drive with stuff
on it that I want to use in another linux system (and I do), these are
the steps that I would follow. I would use the SLAVE, MASTER, CABLE
SELECT jumper on the harddrive to set the set the drive to be a slave,
and boot up my new linux install on another physical drive set to be
master. I closely watch the boot messages, or try going to a place like
/var/log/dmesg to see what hdX (e.g., hda, hdb, hdc) my old drive was
assigned at boot. Partitions on that physical drive get numbers. With
four partitions on my old drive, the root partition on my second drive
was at hdd4. So, I needed to create a mount point to mount my drive to.
For simplicity, I chose to mkdir /mnt/hdd4.

As my old drive was of the ext3 filesystem type, so all mounting
operations need to be told what type (-t for mount) the drive is. To
mount this partitiion, as root I typed mount -t ext3 /dev/hdd4
/mnt/hdd4. I could then cd to /mnt/hdd4 and copy off my files. If I
wanted to reboot with the partition mounted, simply I would just add
something like /dev/hdd4 /mnt/hdd4 etx3 to my /etc/fstab file.