First, check and see if the device is registered on the USB bus. The easiest way to do this is via the command:
$ grep Product /proc/bus/usb/devices
With my Cowon A2 plugged in, I get this list:
S: Product=EHCI Host Controller
S: Product=USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse
S: Product=COWON A2 Portable Multimedia Player
S: Product=UHCI Host Controller
S: Product=UHCI Host Controller
S: Product=UHCI Host Controller
(Everything you could ever want to know about your computer and the processes running on it is stored somewhere in /proc as plain-text files. )
With the Cowon attached I can see a /proc/scsi/usb-storage directory, and with command 'cat /proc/scsi/usb-storage/1' I see:
Attached devices:
Host: scsi1 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
Host scsi1: usb-storage
Vendor: COWON SYSTEMS, Inc.
Product: COWON A2 Portable Multimedia Player
Serial Number: 00000000
Protocol: Transparent SCSI
Transport: Bulk
Quirks:
Next the command 'cat /proc/scsi/scsi' returns:
Attached devices:
Host: scsi1 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
Vendor: TOSHIBA Model: MK3006GAL Rev: 0000
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02
This is the Toshiba-built harddrive in the Cowon. Like most non-IDE devices it looks like a SCSI device. Most mass-storage interfaces in Linux appear to be SCSI devices because it's been easy to extend the SCSI interface to cover other things like USB drives. As Jinto observes, SATA devices also appear to be SCSI.
So on my machine, where I have no SATA drives, the Cowon is assigned the filename /dev/sda1, which is partition 1 of the primary "SCSI" drive /dev/sda. Your machine with SATA drives will have them assigned to /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, etc., with the media player's drive assigned to the next-highest letter. If you have two SATA drives, chances are good the media player would be /dev/sdc1. You could then, as root, mount the media player with 'mount /dev/sdc1 /some/mount/point'. If it has a FAT32 filesystem, as most such devices do, Linux should detect the file format automatically; if not, try using 'mount -t vfat /dev...' instead.
Still I don't understand why your device doesn't just appear on-screen when you plug it in. On my Fedora+KDE system, attaching a USB-storage device results in a window opening on my screen asking me what I want to do with it. In KDE, you can assign different actions to different devices. I open my Canon camera with an image viewing application, but I open the Cowon with KDE's file/web browser Konqueror. I don't have any entry in /etc/fstab for removable storage devices like the Cowon. It all happens automagically when the USB bus detects a new device, the same as it does in Windows. Some of this happens at the kernel level (detecting the device), some of it happens in userland (displaying the alternatives window), and some of it happens at the root user level (mounting the device itself). I have much less experience with GNOME, the default Ubuntu, and Fedora, desktop, though I was pretty sure this type of automounting worked there as well.
If you haven't invested much in this installation, but you're generally happy with Ubuntu, you might want to give
Kubuntu a try.