Want a detailed description of mounting

[jerinj13]

I hear every body saying mounting a floppy disk and so and have heard about the mount command which does this 4 us. But I am still ignorant of what's mounting and why windows doesnt require manual mounting(or it doesnt uses mounting). Please clarify me

[jens]

Auto mounting exists for Linux as well...
As for "mount" see man mount.

[darklordsatan]

Automount is posible in Linux by entering the required line in the file /etc/fstab, that shows the devices currently set to be automounted. On the other side, the file /etc/mtab shows the currently mounted devices in the system.

In order to automount your floppy, you need to add the required line, see man mount as jens suggested.

[jeickal]

I hear every body saying mounting a floppy disk and so and have heard about the mount command which does this 4 us. But I am still ignorant of what's mounting and why windows doesnt require manual mounting(or it doesnt uses mounting). Please clarify me

There is no such thing as "c:" or "d:" units in Linux. Everything is on the same tree with "/" as the root directory. So whenever you want to use a file system (on a floppy, cdrom, HD, USB key, ....) you need to tell the kernel on which directory to "mount* this file system. It's like linking a file system on a device to a directory in your dir tree. So for ex, if you plug a USB key, you have to mount the file system on the key on a directory of your choice so that you can read the content. Get the idea?
Now like mentionned above some distros have automount capabilities, that are picking a folder for you and automatically mount your device once you plug it.
Hope that helps making it clearer for you.

[Cabhan]

As a bit more of a clarification...

Windows has separate drives for each device. Floppies are A:\ and the main hard drive is C:\.

Linux is like a surge protector. Everything is in one big body. That's your hard drive. But that's only the hard drive! If you want to access, say, a floppy disk, you have to plug it into the surge protector, which is the Linux filesystem.

Every device has a certain file associated with it. Floppies, for example, are /dev/fd0. So you might run a command saying:

mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy

This takes the device at /dev/fd0 and plugs it into the folder /mnt/floppy. Similarly, to unplug the item, you run:

umount /mnt/floppy

There are 2 files associated with mounting:

/etc/fstab

This is an explanation for the system explaining how to mount each device. For example, my USB drive (/dev/sda1) has the following line:

/dev/sda1            /media/usb           auto       noauto,users,rw 0 0

This takes the device at /dev/sda1 and plugs it into /media/usb. The filesystem type is determined automatically. It will not be mounted automatically or on a system startup, it is mountable by all users, and all users have read and write permissions.

/etc/mtab

This file contains information on what filesystems are currently mounted on your computer. You won't modify this one manually, I don't believe, but I suppose it can be useful to look at at times.


I hope that helps some!

[towel401]

so if i have it set to auto instead of noauto it will mount automatically when i plug it in?

[mohit dhawan]

so if i have it set to auto instead of noauto it will mount automatically when i plug it in?

yes