Questions about mounting filesystems, such as those on internal drives or on CDs, DVDs, external hard drives or USB flash drives, or about using the mount
command.
At boot time the root filesystem (/
) is mounted, meaning the storage device that contains it is connected to the operating system so that it can be used. Other filesystems may then be attached to this root filesystem at mount points, locations on the root filesystem tree. A mount point is always a directory, so it has the usual Linux permission attributes, which can be used to control how the attached filesystem can be used.
In Ubuntu, filesystems to be mounted at boot time are specified in the /etc/fstab
file with appropriate mount points and settings. When external storage devices (such as CDs or flash drives) are connected, they are usually automatically mounted. Mount points for removable media and non-Ubuntu partitions should be in /media
To mount, remount (with specific options) or unmount a filesystem, and to view information about currently mounted filesystems, the mount
command is used. This command and its opposite umount
require root privilege to mount or unmount filesystems. An alternative that does not require elevated permissions is provided by the udisks
utility udisksctl