On Sunday 04 August 2002 03:10 am, Sean Goh wrote:
> er....i'm a real newbie....what does it mean to mount?
A filesystem (usually on a disk partition, floppy disk, or cdrom) can only be
accessed after it's been mounted. Mounting sets a flag on the filesystem so
that if there is a sudden crash or power failure, on reboot, the system knows
that the partition may not be in a consistent state. During a proper
shutdown, all filesystems are unmounted once their buffers have been properly
written to disk. Of course, read-only filesystems like cdroms don't have any
flags set.
Mounting also assigns where the filesystem will appear in the directory tree.
Unlike the DOS world where disks get assigned (somewhat arbitrary) drive
letters, in Linux, the entire directory structure is a single tree under /.
You select where your disks will appear. For example, you might mount your
old windows partition under /mnt/windows while mounting your floppy disk
under /mnt/floppy. Of course, they don't have to be under /mnt. They could
appear anywhere in the filesystem. Often, the home directory is on a separate
partition so that a system re-install doesn't affect user data. Therefore,
/home is a mounted partition.
Type "mount" at a command prompt to see what is currently mounted on your
system. The output will be
<filesystem> on <mointpoint> type <filesystemtype> <options>
filesystem type could be ext2 or ext3 for native Linux, ntfs or dos for old
Windows partitions, or something else. Options could include "r" for read
only, "rw" for read/write, etc.
See man mount for more details.
-Mad
--
Madness is soil in which creativity grows
- Chris Bielek
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