WHat does mounting mean?

[Nutshell]

Hi,

What does 'mounting a drive' or mounting a device mean?

thnx

and what is a mount point?

thnx

[gnu-ehacks]

Mounting a drive is basically making it accessible.

Let's see...Mount point is kind of hard to explain...It's basically the root directory of a HDD partition.

[Nutshell]

So when you mount a drive, you tell the comp that it's there and i want to use it?

[gnu-ehacks]

I'm pretty sure it is more advanced than that, but I'm not an expert in the subject.

[Unregistered]

Can you tell me what is a 'mount point' then?

thnx

[Nutshell]

The above was me i forgot to log it..

[alex]

Hi!

"Mounting a drive" is an often-used term, but really incorrect. One should say that one mounts a filesystem. This means that the directories and files on the filesystem become accessible from the unix directory tree. If the file "bar" exists in the root of the filesystem, and it is mounted with mount point "/mnt/foo", then it will be visible as the file "/mnt/foo/bar".

A filesystem doesn't have to be on a local drive, but can also be a virtual filesystem shared by a network of computers (NFS, Coda, SMB), or it can exist on a number of drives (RAID, LVM). It can even exist within another filesystem as a file containing another filesystem (like iso-images).

But in the end mounting means telling the computer (unix/linux) that it (the filesystem) is there, and you want to use it. ;)

greetinx,
alex

[Unregistered]

thnx alex.