Date: Thu, 7 Feb 2002 18:47:05 -0800 From: Johnson David <djohnson@acuson.com> To: freebsd@dignons.com, freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org Subject: Re: mount faq Message-ID: <20020208024723.AA9C337B41A@hub.freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <20020207180208.18401.h011.c021.wm@mail.dignons.com.criticalpath.net> References: <20020207180208.18401.h011.c021.wm@mail.dignons.com.criticalpath.net>
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On Thursday 07 February 2002 06:02 pm, freebsd@dignons.com wrote: > i am a "newbie" at freebsd and am currently puzzled > with the mount command. i have read the man pages, and > other documentation but still cant seem to get it..can > someone help? If the Handbook is confusing (section 3.4), then the following might help: http://www.daemonnews.org/199811/newbies.html This is an article about mounting and using floppies, but most of the principles apply to mounting other file systems, such as the CDROM or a Windows/DOS partition. In a nutshell, here is the "why" of mounting. Back in the days of the dinosaurs (even before PDP-11's) harddrives and tape drives were very expensive and very big. You didn't insert a floppy or CD, you physically mounted a platter or tape spool. "mount" was a very appropriate name. You also needed to tell the computer somehow that you had changed the platter or spool. Nowadays the drives are much, much smaller and hold much, much more information, but the process is still the same. Every operating system of any sophistication has mount and unmount, or analogous actions. Windows still does this, but it does it for you automatically. There is a daemon program for FreeBDS that will do this automatically as well, but it isn't the easiest thing to set up (although it isn't rocket science either). Here's how you mount under FreeBSD (and all other unices). You take a filesystem (CD, floppy, harddrive partition) and splice it into the Grand Unified Directory Hiearchy. The filesystem is represented by a device (/dev/acd0c) and the splicing point is the directory it gets mounted at. mount also needs to know what kind of filesystem it is (native freebsd, native windows, CDROM iso9660 format, etc). You can also pass it miscellaneous options, such as read-only. Now that you know the "why", the "how" of the Handbook should be understandable. Hope this helps, David To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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