Surely I have gone mad ! You might think, what has Linux to do with horses

? Well Linux might not yet be running a robotic horse, though that too is

not far, but Linux surely has got a lot to do with mounting. You see, mounting

is the Linux phrase for getting the operating system to access your disks.

This disk can be a floppy, a cdrom or a hard disk partition.

To mount a disk , there are two necessary conditions

1. The disk ( device ) must be one of the files in the /dev directory.
2. The disk must be listed in the /etc/fstab ( or /etc/mtab sometimes

   ) file along with some extra information.

By default when you install Linux, it is automatically configured to

be able to access your floppy disks, cdrom and atleast one hard disk.

Also every time you boot into linux, your swap (refer

installation guide

to know what swap is) and your root directory , the \\\'/\\\' directory are mounted.

However there are times when you have stored some songs on your windows

partition and you want to listen to them while running Linux, or maybe read

some web-pages you saved on Windows while running Linux. For this you might

have to configure your system to read the Windows drives or as we say, mount

them.

Mounting is done using the mount command but before using that command

we must actually edit the configuration file for it in the /etc folder.

NOTE : Almost all configuration files

in Linux are stored in the /etc directory and its subdirectories.

The file to look for now is the /etc/fstab file. Open this file in your

favourite text editor.

( If you are using KDE, you can do this by typing \\\" kwrite /etc/fstab

\\\" in the console. )

What you see now is something similar to this :

/dev/hdc5       /              ext2      defaults              1   1

/dev/fd0        /mnt/floppy    auto      noauto,owner          0   0

none            /proc          proc      defaults              0   0

none            /dev/pts       devpts    gid=5,mode=620        0   0

/dev/hdc6       swap           swap      defaults              0   0

/dev/cdrom      mnt/cdrom      iso9660   noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0   0

The dashes here are replaced by blank spaces in the file The first column

lists the device which can be mounted from the /dev directory. The second

column lists the mount point or the directory in which this device can be