2010-03-21, 11:49 AM
I'll echo Hybrid's comments - some OSes do this for us automatically, which discourages us from learning how it's done manually, so we then get caught out due to our over-reliance.
And far from feeling like an idiot - at least you feel like an enlightened one! A true idiot would rant about how it doesn't work and blame the OS, the disk, anything else - but never really ask HOW to get it done. So you don't really fit the profile of a typical idiot, sorry!
As an extension to this thread: these filesystems are usually mounted automatically if they're listed (with relevant information) in the /etc/fstab file - this directs Linux to do the work for us upon reboot.
Even if you DON'T want them to come online automatically, you can still list them there with "no" in the "mount" column, so that later on you can just type something like "mount /mnt/olddrive" and Linux will apply all settings accordingly. I used to do this for floppies, CDs, etc.
Hope that helps!