Mounting and Unmounting Most modern operating systems, including most new versions of Linux,
automount storage devices when they’re attached, meaning the new flash
drive or hard drive is automatically attached to the filesystem. For those
new to Linux, mounting might be a foreign subject.
A storage device must be first physically connected to the filesystem and
then logically attached to the filesystem in order for the data to be made
available to the operating system. In other words, even if the device is physi-
cally attached to the system, it is not necessarily logically attached and avail-
able to the operating system. The term mount is a legacy from the early days
of computing when storage tapes (before hard drives) had to be physically
mounted to the computer system—think of those big computers with spin-
ning tape drives you might have seen old sci-fi movies.
As mentioned, the point in the directory tree where devices are attached
is known as the mount point. The two main mount points in Linux are /mnt and /media. As a convention, devices such as external USB devices and flash
drives can be manually mounted at /mnt, but when automatically mounted,
the /media directory is used (though technically any directory can be used).
Mounting Storage Devices Yourself In some versions of Linux, you need to mount a drive manually in order to
access its content, so this is a skill worth learning. To mount a drive on the
filesystem, use the
mount
command. The mount point for the device should
be an empty directory; if you mount a device on a directory that has subdi-
rectories and files, the mounted device will cover the contents of the direc-
tory, making them invisible and unavailable. So, to mount the new hard
drive sdb1 at the /mnt directory, you would enter the following:
kali >mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt That hard drive should then be available for access. If you want to
mount the flash drive sdc1 at the /media directory, you would enter this:
kali >mount /dev/sdc1 /media
Filesystem and Storage Device Management
107 The filesystems on a system that are mounted at boot-time are kept in a
file at /etc/fstab (short for filesystem table), which is read by the system at every
bootup.
