I have 3 partition on my hard disk, hda1 is an ext2 partition that I use for video, audio, etc; hda2 is a reiserfs partition where I have linux installed, and hda5 is my swap.

currently I'm using
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hd2
to mount hda1, but there's a couple questions I have:
is this the best way to mount my drive? the only way to access it this way is through the /mnt/hd2 folder. in KDE I'm able to link to hda2, but not hda1, so I have a link to the /mnt/hd2 folder to quickly access my hda1 partition. also, KDE infocenter doesn't recognize the filesystem on hda1 but I have no problem through the /mnt/hd2 folder.

secondly, how do I mount my DVD drive? its a fairly new lite-on, is there a tutorial on this?

my goal is to make hda1 act like hda2 does (slackware install took care of hda2 for me), and my dvd to act like my cdrom (which slackware also took care of for me)

when I right-click KDE desktop, and create new, and hard disc (or cd device or whatever)...
i have the options of :
/dev/hda2 ( / )
/dev/hda5 ( swap )
/dev/cdrom
/dev/floppy

I want /dev/hda1 and my dvd to show up too. sorry for the somewhat rambling post, my terminology isn't exactly up to par with some on this forum

show output of :
fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 1 8925 71690031 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 * 8926 9563 5124735 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 9564 9691 1028160 f Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5 9564 9691 1028128+ 82 Linux swap

and another thing...
if its an actual dvd disk, then you don't mount these, you just use a program such as mplayer or xine to play it...

just set it up to mount automatically at bootup per your fstab file, and then just make a link to /mnt/hd2 ... don't use the dropdown list thing you are doing, just make it a link to the mount folder manually..