In my four years of using Linux, it has gotten a lot better about automatically detecting and mounting devices; in particular, I almost never have to mount hard drives or cd-roms manually any more. Other devices, however, remain problematic. You may never have to use the mount command in Linux. You may also win the lottery jackpot; I wouldn’t bet on either. This article is intended to help new users save a lot of the time and trouble that I have gone through.

Source: Using external file devices in Linux: Climbing the “mount” command