I'm not able to grasp the concept of Mount Points in File Systems.

Pankaj

Before you can access a filesystem, you must mount it. One filesystem is mounted to /, most others are mounted to folders in the / filesystem. These are known as mount points. For example, say you have 2 partitions, one for windows and one for Linux. When Linux is booting, it would mount the the Linux partiton (say, /dev/hda2) to / so it can access files on there. Say there is a /mnt/win folder on the / filesystem. You can mount your windows partition (perhaps /dev/hda1) to this /mnt/win folder using this command: 'mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/win' . Once the windows partition is mounted at the /mnt/win mount point, you access the files on the windows partition by entering the /mnt/win folder: 'cd /mnt/win'.

Basically, mount points are places that point to a file system, be it a partition on your hard drive, a floppy/CD drive, or even another computer. It's designed to seamlessl integrate with the directory structure. For example, in Windows, if you want to have a network drive available, you need to assign it a drive letter. Say Windows gives it E: . All your MP3s are on this network drive, so E: makes no sense. In *nix, you can mount it anywhere you want, so you could make a folder named /mp3s and mount the network drive there, and whenever you go to that folder it actually goes to the drive across the network. Also, if I add a Zip drive for example in Windows it will again give it a letter, like G: . In Linux, you can have it be at /zipdrive or wherever, and whenever you copy files to the /zipdrive folder, they go on the zip disk in the drive. So that's what mounting is for and what it does. Before you can use a disk or some hardware, you need to give it a place that points to it that you can use in the file system. AFAIK, Windows does it too, it's just automatic so you can't see it happening.