Mounting drives

Getting Linux to recognize CDs, Flash drives, Disk partitions

To auto-mount or not?

Creating mount points

The hard disk partition

Mounting drives

Getting Linux to recognize CDs, Flash drives, Disk partitions

This article discusses editing the file /etc/fstab, so you have access to the items above.

For setting up a disk partition visible to both Windows and Linux, see:

http://savage.net.au/Linux/html/dual-booting.html

To auto-mount or not?

Auto-mounting means making a file system accessible as soon as you log in after booting.

A hard disk partition will be available as soon as Linux boots, so in that case, auto-mounting makes sense.

Since, at boot time, the CD drive may be empty, and the flash drive may not be plugged, auto-mounting in these cases is not appropriate.

Creating mount points

Sometimes you have to use the mkdir command to create what's called a mount point, and sometimes you don't.

A mount point is simply the name under Linux by which you refer to a drive.

So, if your floppy is mounted at /mnt/floppy, then to list the files on the floppy, you would run this command:

	shell>ls /mnt/floppy

I'm not really clear on this, so don't panic if the information below is not perfect. If you can't access a drive after editing /etc/fstab and rebooting, try creating the mount point manually, as below, and rebooting.

The hard disk partition

The article on dual-booting, mentioned above, gives you noe way to do it. Here's another:

Edit /etc/fstab and add this line (modify as appropriate for your set up):

	/dev/hda4               /mnt/g                  vfat    defaults        0 0

where hda is your '4'th partition on your first ('a') hard disk 'hd', and you've created the directory '/mnt/g' with:

	shell>mkdir /mnt/g

and 'vfat' is the way that partition was formatted. The formatting program probably called it FAT-32, and 'defaults' is the options Linux is to use to access the partition. The 2nd last '0' refers to a dump program, which we can ignore, and the last '0' means do not perform a file system check at boot time.

The CD(s)

I have 2, an old read-only one and a newer burner. So we at to /etc/fstab:

	/dev/cdrom              /mnt/cdrom              iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
	/dev/cdrom1             /mnt/cdrom1             iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0

The Flash drive

This sits on a USB port, which is known to Linux as the first partition ('1') on the first ('a') serial device 'sd', so create the mount point with:

	shell>mkdir /mnt/flash

and add this to /etc/fstab:

	/dev/sda1               /mnt/flash              vfat    noauto          0 0

A Floppy drive

Add this to /etc/fstab:

	/dev/fd0                /mnt/floppy             auto    noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0

Author

Ron Savage.

Home page: http://savage.net.au/index.html

This POD was converted to HTML by /Perl.html#fancy-pom2.pl

Version: 1.01 01-Jun-2006
This version disguises my email address.
Version: 1.00 18-Feb-2002
Original version.

Licence

	All Programs of mine are 'OSI Certified Open Source Software';
	you can redistribute them and/or modify them under the terms of
	The Artistic License, a copy of which is available at:
	http://www.opensource.org/licenses/index.html

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