I installed a new hard drive right before installing the new Ubuntu 11.10 by reformatting, not upgrading. I was able to mount my drive, and partition it. It's a 1TB, and I was able to transfer all of my music, and videos to it.

For some reason, it won't mount on boot, and I can't figure out how to manually mount it afterwards either. Here's my current /etc/fstab:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
#                
proc                                       /proc        proc  nodev,noexec,nosuid           0  0  
# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=e0fbdf09-f9a0-4336-bac3-ba4dc6cfbcc0  /            ext4  errors=remount-ro,user_xattr  0  1  
# swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=adf15180-c84c-4309-bc9f-085fd7464f89  none         swap  sw                            0  0  
/dev/sdc1                                  /media/sdc1  ext4  defaults                      0  0  

The last line is what I added for my hard drive.

Here's the output from sudo lshw -C disk:

% sudo lshw -C disk                                                                                                             ~
  *-disk:0                
       description: ATA Disk
       product: ST3250310AS
       vendor: Seagate
       physical id: 0
       bus info: scsi@2:0.0.0
       logical name: /dev/sda
       version: 3.AD
       serial: 6RYBF2QE
       size: 232GiB (250GB)
       capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos
       configuration: ansiversion=5 signature=000da204
  *-cdrom
       description: DVD-RAM writer
       product: DVD+-RW DH-16A6S
       vendor: PLDS
       physical id: 0.0.0
       bus info: scsi@4:0.0.0
       logical name: /dev/cdrom
       logical name: /dev/cdrw
       logical name: /dev/dvd
       logical name: /dev/dvdrw
       logical name: /dev/scd0
       logical name: /dev/sr0
       version: YD11
       capabilities: removable audio cd-r cd-rw dvd dvd-r dvd-ram
       configuration: ansiversion=5 status=nodisc