How to use mount

How to Mount a file system in Linux

In Linux, everything is a file and it all starts from root (/). Mount command is used to attach the file system on the devices to the root of the system.

To mount /dev/hda1 on /newhd, we use the following command

 # mount -t ext3 /dev/hda1 /newhd 

The above command will mount /dev/hda1 on the directory /newhd as a ext3 file system. Now you can create directories in /newhd directory that will be created in the hard disk hda1.

To check all the mounted partition, use the following command.

 # mount -l

The output is as follows.

[root@localhost]# mount -l
/dev/hda3 on / type ext3 (rw,usrquota,grpquota) []
none on /proc type proc (rw)
/dev/hda1 on /boot type ext3 (rw) []
none on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
/dev/tmpMnt on /tmp type ext2 (rw,noexec,nosuid,loop=/dev/loop0)

Sometimes we mount a wrong partition or our mount command goes wrong. To undo this, we can mount the file system from /etc/fstab as follows

mount -a

To mount a file system as read-only, use the following command. This becomes important when you want to do a fsck on a the partition, since mounting it as read only will prevent any changes in the it while the scan is on.

 # mount -o remount,ro /newhd 

Sometimes it happens that we cannot create a file and it gives errors while creating a file whereas reading the file works just fine. In this scenarios we need to remount the file as read and write, using the following command.

 # mount -o remount,rw /newhd 

Mounting and unmounting (done by the command umount ) a file system can be useful when the system’s harddisk has got corrupted or you need to scan it to remove bad sectors.

How to mount a file system form remote machine (NFS Share)

# mount remote_server:/home/ /home 

This will mount /home drive from remote server to local system, anything written in /home/ on local system will available on remote_server.

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Tags: Linux tools, Most common Linux commands

Category: Linux, Software, Technology