Took the plunge, cant find my stuff

OK I have my computer on Mandrake 10. So how the heck do I find my other drives? It would be nice to be able to play a CD or two w/o the actual CD being in my comp.

Heck but it would even be nice if I could put a CD in and actally hear it. WTF???

You have to mount the drives. Drives have a device assignment in linux.

/dev/hda - ide0 master
/dev/hdb - ide0 slave
/dev/hdc - ide1 master
/dev/hdd - ide1 slave

Scsi drives (or I think SATA, though I don't have that) are:

/dev/sda
/dev/sdb
/dev/sdc
etc.

To read the contents of a drive, you must mount it. To do so, use the (surprise) mount command.

Example: Say I want to mount partition 4 of the master hard drive on ide1, assuming it's an ntfs partition, to the directory /mnt/foobar. Note that the mount directory must already exist.

mount -t ntfs /dev/hdc /mnt/foobar

Now if you go the the /mnt/foobar directory (you can name it whatever you want) you will see the files on that partition.

Types of filesystems supported and their linux names are: (There are MANY more, these are some common ones)

msdos FAT16
vfat FAT32
ntfs NTFS
ext2 linux ext2 (the most common linux filesystem)
ext3 linux ext3 (ext2 with journalling)
reiserfs reiser fs, used by some linux versions, fast when you access lots of small files
iso9660 standard CDROM filesystem

Regarding being able to play your CD's without it being in, if you have an image of the CD, you can mount the image, though I don't know the exact syntax for that case. I think the option loop is used, or something similar. As to how to create the image, I think the command dd should work, though again I'm not completely sure. Maybe someone else can fill in the blanks?