May 18, 2008

Mounting file system

Mounting file system


This option allows your workstation to configure what file system can be accessed.

File systems reside on mass storage devices such as diskettes, hard drives, and CD-ROMs.

Each storage media can be a different type of file system such as FAT, FAT32, NTFS, and HPFS etc. Under Linux, it is possible to link different file systems on a mass storage device into a single, larger file system. This is accomplished by placing mounting points of a device's file system in a directory on another file system. So while the root directory of a drive on a different machine may be referred to as c:\, the same drive on a Linux system may be accessible as /mnt/xdir; where xdir can be any name (it is a directory, known as mount point).

When a device is mounted, it is then accessible to the system's users who have proper permission to access it. Linux conf is a way of mounting file systems. You can also mount it by command line. For example, to mount the first diskette drive on /mnt/floppy, you would type the command mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy

* Note that floppy is a subdirectory inside mnt directory.

During the installation of Linux, a file that holds the information of mount points is created and it is located in /etc/fstab

To auto mount devices at boot time, this file can be edited to add new devices that points to file systems.

Reviewing Your Current File system

  • Open Config => File systems => Access local drive.
The source here displays all mounted drives, figure in previous post displays hda, and this means it is an IDE drive.
  • fd indicates a diskette drive

hd indicates an IDE hard drive


If you have any other IDE drive, a second would be hdb, a third one would be hdc… and also follows a number, and these numbers represent the partitions.

Mount point: The actual location from which the file system is mounted and accessed.

FsType: The type of file system. A standard Linux partition uses the ext2 file system type, mandrake 9.0 uses ext3, DOS uses FAT16, Windows uses FAT16, FAT32, and Windows NT uses NTFS.

Size: Partition Size

Partition type: A description of the file system used on that partition

Status: Whether the device is mounted or not

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