Mounting and Unmounting Devices

Before you can read a device normally you need to mount the device. Some operating systems do not give you much of a choice as to where the device is mounted. In Linux you have lots of control. The file /etc/fstab tells you most of the default locations for devices to be mounted. If the device is listed in the /etc/fstab file you can easily mount and unmount. This is how you would mount and unmount a floppy disk and a cdrom respectively:

bash# mount /mnt/floppy
bash# umount /mnt/floppy

bash# mount /mnt/cdrom
bash# umount /mnt/cdrom

That looks pretty easy. You can also mount and unmount other things. A CD image file can be mounted with a line like this:

bash# mount -t iso9660 -o ro,loop=/dev/loop0 imagefile.iso directory/

When the CD image is mounted you can look around inside and make sure it looks right before you burn it.