depending on version it would or would not show on desktop.

personally I would go the manual way, not all would, but it is actually the "easy way", true it requires some typing but it almost always works. and if not we have more information to work with to solve the problem.

to find what disk it is we want you can type command below to list available disks.

Code:
sudo fdisk -l
(the l is lowercase L) to find the

then do

Code:
sudo mount
to se what (if anything) is mounted and where.

now do
Code:
ls /media
to see if there is already a folder created for the disk and partition you want to reach.

if not create it
Code:
sudo mkdir /media/yourname
now mount it.
Code:
sudo mount -t filesystem /dev/diskname+partitionnumber/media/yourname
filesystem is the filesystem of the disk, ntfs, vfat, ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs...

ask further if you have problems, that book should have more information, not to mention the internet, but feel free to ask anyway.