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Title: Mounting, partitioning and configuring filesystems

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Mounting, partitioning and configuring filesystems

Under Linux, several filesystems and filesystem types (e.g. ext2, minix, msdos, vfat ,iso9660) can be assembled into a great filesystem in /.

This mechanism is necessary, because under Linux different logic drives as e.g. in DOS (C:, D:, etc.) do not exist. All physical drives - same whether hard disk, diskette, CD-ROM drive, MO, ZIP drive, etc. - seem to the Linux system as filesystems, which are integrated into the above mentioned filesystem /.

One calls this procedure mount. When one wants to remove again a filesystem from the / filesystem, one speaks about unmount.

Conditions for joining and mounting filesystems are:

• A known filesystem must be created on the respective medium (CD, MO, ZIP medium) or partition (hard disk) (it corresponds to formatting). The order mount must support this filesystem type .
• There must be a point available, at which the filesystem can be mounted to the / filesystem. This point is called mountpoint and is in general an empty directory that one must create with mkdir.
• The filesystem type to be mounted must either be declared to the mount command or must be made known in the file /etc/fstab. The (regularly, e.g. at system start) filesystems to be mounted are listed in the file /etc/fstab, a line per filesystem . A

  man fstab
  man mount
  

  tells details about this.

This is in general correctly arranged by YaST, so that e.g. /usr/local is mounted right after /usr . The mount command itself cannot take this into consideration and mounts the filesystem as the sequence appears in /etc/fstab.

Interesting for the use of either mount or /etc/fstab are the options user and noauto.

user allows to any user to mount or unmount a filesystem (interesting at the CD-ROM).

noauto arranges not to mount automatically at a system start the identified partition (particularly mount -a). It must be explicitly mounted manually. This is useful with media that are not always available at a system start (again here for example the CD-ROM).

Please read as well the article about Division of the hard disk into partitions.

See also:

Partitions: Distribution of filesystems
Linux and Windows NT
Installing Linux,DOS,Windows,WindowsNT onto one hard disk
Changing the partitions of your Linux distribution
OS/2, Linux and invalid partition tables

Keywords: PARTITION, FILESYSTEM, FSTAB, ETC, MOUNT, AUTOMOUNT

Feedback welcome: Send Mail to martin.scherbaum@suse.de (Please give the following subject: SDB-maddin_fstab)

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