All formatted file system in Linux need to be mount before you start using them. To mount / unmounts a file system, you need to mount command in Linux.
Before mounting a file system you need to have a mount point. Mount point is directory you create for mounting a file system.
The list of all file system that are currently mounted on system are listed in file –
/etc/mtab
To view currently mounted file systems type command
cat /etc/mtab
The list of all file system that will be mounted at time of booting of system are listed in file –
/etc/fstab
Like mtab you can fstab mount points by
cat /etc/fstab
1. List current mounts
To view all currently mounted file systems/mount points you can simply use mount command in Linux without any arguments.
2. Mount fstab file systems in Linux
To mount all file systems / mount points in fstab use
mount –a
This will mount all file system in fstab file.
To mount a specific mount point use command
mount /mount_point_name
3. Mount CD-ROM in Linux
To use CD-ROM in your system use mount command in Linux , after you have created mount point CD
mount -t iso9660 -o ro /dev/cdrom /CD
-ro mounts CD-ROM with read only access
4. Mount USB Disk in Linux
Once you plug in your USB disk new block device will be created in /dev directory
View details of your usb disk
fdisk –l
Below is output of this command you can see usb is listed in end as /dev/sdb1
Mount usb in Linux
Once you know you device name create a mount point and run command
mount –t vfat /dev/sdb1 /mnt
refer above image
This will mount contents of usb to /mnt directory.
5. Mount an ISO image file in Linux
ISO image file can be mounted with loop device ( option –o loop is used for it)
mount -t iso9660 -o loop stars.iso /mnt
This will mount stars.iso file to /mnt mount point.
6. Mount Windows NTFS Partition in Linux
Like in case usb first view details of your ntfs partition
fdisk –l
Now use mount command to mount your NTFS partition
mount -t ntfs /dev/sda1 /mnt/
This will mount your ntfs partition to mnt folder in root of your file-system If you want to mount your ntfs partition at start-up follow guide – Mount NTFS partition at startup.
To unmount a file system in Linux you have to use umount command. I will update this tutorial soon.
