Re: [Sheflug] mount & boot

[José Luis Gómez Dans <nospam [at] sheffield.ac.uk>]

On Sat, Jul 08, 2000 at 01:04:14AM +0100, Pete Smith wrote:
> When trying Jose's mount/dev/hdb -tvfat/hdb/cdrom

	With linux, you have to be carefult with your "spelling". A
capital is different to a normal letter, and spaces might count. The
above is mis-spelled. You should have
	mount /dev/hdb -tiso9660 /mnt/cdrom

	(make sure that /mnt/cdrom exists, and note that I made a
mistake!!!)


	Anyway, on the theory of mounting filesystems: UNIX in general
has a different approach to what the filesystem is than MS-DOS or
Windows. In UNIX (linux is just a variant), everytihng is under the same
directory tree, usually termed root or /. If you want to access your CD
ROM, you have to make sure that it is "mounted", i.e., present somewhere
(as a subdirectory) below root. In Windows, it gets another letter (say
G:). In UNIX, it gets it's own directory.

	In order to mount it, you use the mount command. This is quite
simple to use (and can be automated). You type
	mount <device> -t<fs_type> <mount_point>
	where the stuff between the <> stands for
<device> This tells Linux the physical device. Usually /dev/something
<fs_type> This tells linux the filesystem you're using. Notice that you
can mount any filesystem you want (well, nearly any!), be it DOS,
Windows, Amiga... Once is mounted, the same commands that work in the
linux fs will work on the newly mounted one. Clever!
<mount_point> the directory where this thing is gonna be mounted.

	So for the above command,
	<device> -> /dev/hdb (from your previous message. Physical
				location of your hard drive)
	<fs_type> -> iso9660 (filesystem used by CD ROMs; for a Windows
				drive, this could be vfat)
	<mount_point> -> /mnt/cdrom (the directory in which you will
					access the CD-ROM)

	Hope this little explanation clears some of your doubts (more
advanced users please do ignore inaccuracies :-D)

	José

-- 
José L Gómez Dans			PhD student
					Radar & Communications Group
					Department of Electronic Engineering
					University of Sheffield UK
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Sheffield Linux User's Group - http://www.sheflug.co.uk
To unsubscribe from this list send mail to
- <sheflug-request [at] vuw.ac.nz> - with the word 
 "unsubscribe" in the body of the message. 

  GNU the choice of a complete generation.