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Linux Question - What's "mounting"?

Y

Yohhan

Senior member
Trying to learn Linux here... what does the "mount" command do? And is there something equivalent on the windows systems? Thanks.
 
Well, let's start with the basics - On UNIX/Linux, there is no C:, D:, etc.. drives. Partitions are mounted in a certain folder. There is a special partition - the root partition, which is mounted on /. Other partitions will be mounted on subdirectories of / (such as /usr, /home, /var, etc...). If you type mount on a linux/unix system you will get a listing of the mounted partitions (also referred to as volumes). You can mount a partition by typing in mount -t ext2 partition mount_point. ext2 is the type of partition. Most linux partitions are ext2, but you can also use vfat or iso9660. You can also use auto and the system will try to figure out what kind of partition it is.
Windows 2000 allows you to mount partitions on several drive letters and even in directories. You can do it in computer management in the disk manager (forget which one exactly).
-David
 
an example: to use a cdrom in windows, the drive is always there, with a letter. when you put a disc in, it makes the data available through that letter. In linux, instead of D:, you would usually have a DIRECTORY called /mnt/cdrom, and when you put a CD in, if it isn't set to mount automatically, you would type "mount /mnt/cdrom".

Take a look at /etc/fstab. note the filesystems listed there. if you want to mount something not present there (say you create a file that has its own filesystem, or want to use an ISO file without burning it to CD - this is called "loopback") you would use the following syntax:
mount -t <filesystem_type> <path to file> <mount point>

the filesystem_type could be ext2 or ext3 (linux), ntfs (duh), vfat (fat32), msdos (fat16) and there are a few others you wouldn't normally use. the path to the file is just the location of the file. the mount point is where the new filesystem is going to appear. You can mount it to ANY existing directory, such as /tmp, /bin, /usr, /mnt, etc. it is just a very bad idea to mount something over a directory that has data of its own, since you will have to unmount to access the existing data. if you mount your mp3/pr0n/movie hard drive to /bin, you won't be able to access anything that was in /bin before. I tihnk that means you wouldn't be able to unmount the partition. If data there is in use currently, it may give you an error and not mount.

I can't try this now since my linux boxes are off for the summer.
 
of course! it can't handle summer, didn't you know that? 😉

actually... during the spring/fall I'm at college. the linux boxes are just servers. Fixed bill for electricity/housing regardless of use. during summer, i'm at home on dialup. no need for servers, so they'd be a waste of electricity. 🙁
 
So would it be possible to hot-swap a drive by unmounting it first, replacing the drive and then mounting the new drive?
 
Originally posted by: atrowe
So would it be possible to hot-swap a drive by unmounting it first, replacing the drive and then mounting the new drive?
Click to expand...

NO!!!
IDE does not Hot-Swap
Just because the OS doesn't see it doesn't mean that there isn't power to it, etc.
 
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