In essence all a mount point is is a directory in you file system ie.
/mnt/cdrom or /mnt/floppy. they are only empty directories until you mount a
device to them. What mounting does is attach the device, in this case you
CD-Rom, to that directory in your file system so that you can access it.
I'll probably get flamed for using this analogy but oh well :)
In windows your CD-Rom is assigned drive D:, you floppy is A: and the
harddrive is C: etc. All those letters are just telling windows where to
find a particular device at. Linux does basically the same thing except it
uses a different naming scheme. In linux the cd-rom is usually /mnt/cdrom
and the floppy is /mnt/floppy. Actually in linux your mount points can be
almost anything you want them to be.
Thats mount points in a nutshell as i understand them. Now for mounting...
In windows when you stick a cd in the drive windows automatically mounts it
at drive D: while in linux you have to mount it yourself. In windows when
you put the cd in, the drive tells windows that "hey, the user stuck a cd in
me" while with linux you tell linux "Hey, i stuck a cd in the drive and you
can find it here (where you mounted it at)."
There is an exception to this in linux though. It is called automount and
uses entries in fstab to do all the mounting for you automatically. You will
have to talk to someone else to get more info on automount though, i was
lucky to understand the above analogy when a friend explained it to me.
Hopes this helps,
Ian K. Harrell
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of mike smalheiser
Sent: Tuesday, February 06, 2001 1:11 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [newbie]
hey there,
i was wondering what the difference is between mounting my cd-rom
drive, and creating a mount point for it. and i was wondering if you could
tell me how to create a moint point for it. thanks alot
mike
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