You should make 1 swap partition that is double the size of your RAM to the maximum of 1GB.
AFAIK, swap partition of more than 1GB doesn't give any performance advantage unless you are gonna use memory hogging applications.
RAMx2<=swap<1GB
For other partition select either ext3 or reiserfs.
Do not use root level access. IMO it is totally worthless to use root level access as it raises unnecessary security risk.
By disks, do you mean cd/dvd/floppy drives. Yeah they aren't automatically mounted. But,
AFAIK ubuntu mounts hard drive partitions automatically.