Just installed Dapper Drake and much to my dismay, I am missing my music partition. Thought this was fishy. in /etc/fstab it only has one device mounted to the default /media/sdb1 however I know that there are more partitions on this disk, and so to investigate, I threw in an old knoppix distro just to make sure. Sure enough all my partitions are readable in knoppix and usable... So why is Ubuntu not giving me love?

Because you need to add a line(s) to the /etc/fstab to have the partition(s) mounted on boot or if not wanting automatic mounting you need to mount them yourself after boot. Look at the line(s) Knoppix uses in its fstab then edit your install fstab to be similar to them except you change the /mnt/sdb? part of the line(s) to a mount point that you have created on your system, once done use mount -a to mount all the partition(s) in the fstab for use.

/proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/sys /sys sysfs noauto 0 0
/dev/pts /dev/pts devpts mode=0622 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/auto/floppy auto user,noauto,exec,umask=000 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/auto/cdrom auto user,noauto,exec,ro 0 0
# Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/hdg1 /mnt/hdg1 ntfs noauto,users,exec,ro,umask=000,uid=knoppix,gid=knoppix 0 0
# Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/hdg2 /mnt/hdg2 ntfs noauto,users,exec,ro,umask=000,uid=knoppix,gid=knoppix 0 0
# Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/hdg3 /mnt/hdg3 ntfs noauto,users,exec,ro,umask=000,uid=knoppix,gid=knoppix 0 0
# Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/hde2 /mnt/hde2 ntfs noauto,users,exec,ro,umask=000,uid=knoppix,gid=knoppix 0 0
# Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/hde5 /mnt/hde5 ntfs noauto,users,exec,ro,umask=000,uid=knoppix,gid=knoppix 0 0
# Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/hde6 none swap defaults 0 0
# Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/hde7 /mnt/hde7 ext3 noauto,users,exec 0 0

and now here is the Ubuntu version.
Looks completely different.
Any suggestions?



# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/sda7 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/sda2 /media/sda2 ntfs defaults,nls=utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 1
/dev/sda5 /media/sda5 ntfs defaults,nls=utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 1
/dev/sdb1 /media/sdb1 ntfs defaults,nls=utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 1
/dev/sda6 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdc /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0

Generally you should just duplicate the /dev/sdb1 entry for the other partitions on the drive, all that you should need to change is the /media/sdb1 & /dev/sdb1 in the lines to match the partitions as they are numbered looks like to 2 and 3 for them.

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/sda7 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/sda2 /media/sda2 ntfs defaults,nls=utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 1
/dev/sda5 /media/sda5 ntfs defaults,nls=utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 1
/dev/sdb1 /media/sdb1 ntfs defaults,nls=utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 1
/dev/sdb2 /media/sdb2 ntfs defaults,nls=utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 1
/dev/sdb3 /media/sdb3 ntfs defaults,nls=utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 1
/dev/sda6 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdc /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0

followed by

daniel@daniel-desktop:~$ sudo mount -a
mount: mount point /media/sdb2 does not exist
mount: mount point /media/sdb3 does not exist

where am i going wrong?

Not reading the message.
Create the new mounts under /media

More specifically mkdir /media/sdb2 and sdb3 as root then try again.

you guys rock. Problem solved.
Now do i need to make similar entries in /etc/mtab for it to auto mount?

I doubt it the mtab is created from the contents of the fstab file so if your sdb1 automounts then the others should as well.