I have just installed Ubuntu on a machine that previously had XP installed on it. The machine has 2 HDD (hard disk drives). I opted to install Ubuntu completely over XP.

I am new to Linux, and I am still learning how to navigate teh file structure. However, AFAICT), there is only one drive. I want to be able to store programs etc on the first drive, and store data (program output etc) on the second drive.

It appears Ubuntu is not aware that I have 2 drives (on XP, these were drives C and D).

1. How can I mount the second drive (ideally, I want to do this automatically on login, so that the drive is available to me whenever I login - withou manual intervention from me)

2. In XP, I could refer to files on a specific drive by prefixing with the drive letter (e.g. c:\foobar.cpp and d:\foobar.dat). I suspect the notation on ubuntu is different. How may I specify specific files on different drives?

3. Last but notbthe least (a bit unrelated to previous questions). This relates to direcory structure again. I am a developer (C++ for desktops and PHP for websites), I want to install the following apps/ libraries.

i). Apache 2.2 ii). PHP 5.2.11 iii). MySQL (5.1) iv). SVN v). Netbeans vi). C++ development tools (gcc, gdb, emacs etc) vii). QT toolkit viii). Some miscellaeous scientific software (e.g. www.r-project.org, www.gnu.org/software/octave/)

I would be grateful if a someone can recommend a directory layout for these applications. Regarding development, I would also be grateful if someone could point out where to store my project and source files i.e:

(i) *.cpp, *.hpp, *.mak files for cpp projects (ii) individual websites

On my XP machine the layout for C++ dev was like this:

c:\dev\devtools (common libs and headers etc) c:\dev\workarea (root folder for projects) c:\dev\workarea\c++ (c++ projects) c:\dev\workarea\websites (web projects)

I would like to create a similar folder structure on the linux machine, but its not clear whether to place these folders under /, /usr, /home or swomewhere else (there seems to be abffling number of choices, so I want to get it "right" first time - i.e having a directory structure that most developer use, so it is easier when communicating with other ubuntu/linux developers)