D-day arrived yesterday with my main machine at home making the switch to
debian. Everything installed nicely and was relatively a pain-free experience. I
installed it onto a new larger HD, so that all my old data is still on the old
harddrive.

I've made the new harddrive 'master' which is called hda and the old one 'slave'
being hdd (with the harddrive jumper settings). How do I go about mounting the
old drive so that I can access it on my new debian install? I want to copy over
all my .settings files to my ~/ so that when I install all the apps I need, they
are already set up for me.

I have tried entering in an entry into /etc/fstab which emulated one of the
other entries, except that it pointed to /dev/hddx -where x was the number of
the partition. I created a folder /mnt/mandrake, which is where the old
partition was mounted. However, whenever I tried to mount it with mount
/mnt/mandrake I got a complaint about it being the wrong filesystem (although my
mandrake partitions are all ext3, just as the new debian ones).

Anyone got any other tips that I'm missing here (or am I completely off-track
anyway)?

thanks in advance

the slave is hdd?? that's secondary slave... so it's on a physically different IDE cable yeah? if not it's hdb.

mount /dev/hdd1 /mnt/mdk

should work every time, check fdisk -l /dev/hdd to check the partition types.