--- layout: page category-page: intermediate category-title: Intermediate commands tags: mount drive umount storage device author: Marco Farace title: mount --- To access a file on a Unix-like machine, the file system that contains it needs to be mounted with the mount command. Mount is frequently used for movable storage devices such as SD cards, DVDs, etc...
The mount command instructs the operating system that a file system is ready to use, and associates it with a particular point in the overall file system hierarchy (its mount point) and sets options relating to its access. Mounting makes file systems, files, directories, devices and special files available for use and available to the user.
Its counterpart, umount, does exactly the opposite.
Both mount and umount require root user persmissions.
To display all mounted partitions just write mount.
This command will mount the second partition of a HDD:
mount /dev/hda2 /media/PHOTOS
and will unmount (by referring to the physical disk partition):
umount /dev/hda2
or (by referring to the mount point):
umount /media/PHOTOS

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