I don't understand why I Firefox is unaffected in the current distressful situation. Aren't there things in the home directory, now lost, that it needs to function even marginally?

What mounting does is to make something accessible. An example would be if you have a Linux operating system on sda1 and you install another operating system on sda5, you can mount sda5 from the original system (sda1) and if done properly, you will be able to access, read, write, copy, delete or whatever files/directories on sda5. It doesn't have to be another operating system on sda5. It can be just a data partition or it can be a flash drive or an external hard drive. Accessibility is the word.

Before you can mount anything, you need a mount point. In my above example, you would first need to create a mount point (directory) usually in the /mnt directory for sda5 and the simplest and least confusing thing to name it is, sda5 but it is not necessary.

I didn't read over your entire thread but before you start deleting things in the /mnt directory, it might be a good idea to post what you have there so someone can give you advice.

ls -l /mnt

I certainly see your point.

Here is the output from your code:

[user@localhost home]$ ls -l /mnt
total 64
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2008-03-19 15:45 cdrom
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2008-03-28 08:26 cdrom1
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2008-03-28 08:26 cdrom2
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2008-03-28 08:26 disk
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2008-03-28 08:26 floppy
drwxr-xr-x 2 user user 4096 2011-09-28 18:04 home
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2008-05-21 22:14 local
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2008-03-28 08:26 res
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2008-03-19 03:34 sda2
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2008-03-19 03:34 sda5
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2008-03-19 03:34 sda6
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2008-03-24 15:00 sda7
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2008-03-26 15:07 sda9
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2008-03-20 17:34 sdb1
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2008-04-17 00:24 usb
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2008-03-28 08:26 windows
[user@localhost home]$

Before I deleted it, home was 3 GB.

Try the command "mount" by itself. It will list all the mounted thingies on your system.

In a unix-type system, all the filesystems are connected together into a tree. This is a computer science term for things that are connected together from a root point, and there are sub-trees from each part of the tree.

So for example, the root directory is called "/", and it is considered to be a tree. Subdirectories are also trees. You might have a home directory which is at /home/glenellynboy. You can see that / is the root, then /home is where the home directories are often kept, and /home/glenellynboy is maybe your personal home directory. These are connected together by the named directories such as "home" and "glenellynboy", and the ".." directories. That's why it's called a tree.

The relationship to telescopes is like this. You might have a tripod which has a place to connect a telescope. This special place might be called a "telescope mount point". If there is no telescope mounted, the mount point will be empty. Once you connect a telescope to the mount point, then there will be a telescope on the mount point. Clearly if you try to use a tripod which has no telescope mounted on it for looking at the moon, you won't get the results you want.

Similarly, if you think you have mounted a filesystem (such as a backup drive) to a mount point, you might try to copy some files to the backup drive. But if the backup drive isn't mounted, you won't get the results you want.

To check what is mounted, you can use the "mount" command. If you try to mount a backup drive to /mnt/backup for example, you can change directory to /mnt/backup and make sure it worked:

cd /mnt/backup
df .

If there is no backup drive mounted there, the df command will tell you that the "filesystem" is your root file system (eg: /dev/sda3), and the "mounted on" will say "/".

Once you have mounted your backup drive, the "filesystem" will change to indicate that your backup drive is there, so for example, it might say /dev/sdb7. And "mounted on" will change to "/mnt/backup".

If you do "cd" to your mounted backup drive, you can't unmount it until you "cd" to somewhere that is not on that filesystem. So you would need to "cd", "cd ~", "cd $HOME", or "cd /home/glenellynboy", which all might do pretty much the same thing, depending on your system setup.

1 members found this post helpful.

So then anytime I create a mounting it is never assigned only to the device and its location, but always includes designation of a place in the tree to which the device is mounted. And so the analogy to a telescope is plain--a telescope that works includes a tripod, a mounting, and a telescope, not just a tripod or a telescope, plus a mounting.

If I am getting this right, then once a device is mounted it can only take commands that incorporate the place in the tree to which it is associated by the mounting, as well as the device itself--rather than leaving to subsequent commands to specify a place in the tree which will be involved with the device.

I think you're getting there. Look at your /etc/fstab file, which is where devices are mapped to mount points. The most important parts of /etc/fstab are the first four columns, "filesystem, mount point, type, options". You should be able to look at /etc/fstab and get some idea of how your system is laid out on the disks, such as where your root directory is mounted, where /home is, where backup drives might go, where the dvd drive is, that sort of thing.

The idea of connecting things into a tree makes the system easier to use. Compare to the DOS approach, where you put in a floppy disk, it might end up being called d:, e:, f: or anything really, depending on system setup. That makes it hard to use the system, because you don't know where things will end up being.

Using the unix approach, with mount and fstab, you can say exactly where something will be in your filesystem tree, so you can plan ahead much better.

Also you should probably try the "mount" command by itself, and post the output to this thread. I don't think that your real home directory would be mounted on /mnt/home. But it could be, it would be possible to set up a system like that.

Here is the output of mount:

[user@localhost ~]$ mount
/dev/sda1 on / type ext2 (rw)
none on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
none on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
none on /sys type sysfs (rw)
none on /mnt/home type aufs (rw,si=d6e32a80,xino=/home/user/.aufs.xino,create=mfs,dirs=/home/user=rw)
[user@localhost ~]$

I have lost the directories, Documents, Videos, Pictures, and Downloads. I saved a couple documents and they went straight into my home directory. Same with a download of UNetBootin. How do I run unetbootin now? I did it in root, with sudo, before, but what path should I use? The title bar of the file is "home" but the address window says "my disk".

Are you following the instructions?

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/unetbootin/wiki/guide

What happens, from your mount output is that your linpus installation was made as an aufs disk image in your /home directory (/home/user/.aufs) and the disk image gets mounted in /mnt/home. When you deleted the contents of /mnt you also deleted /mnt/home.

I was given by TobiSGD the code:

mkfs -t vfat -F 32 /dev/sdXY

to format my flash drive as FAT. Do I need to add sudo at the beginning?

I was given by Snooly this code to install p7zip:

sudo su -
yum update
yum install p7zip

After "yum update" at the end it produced:

Transaction Check Error:
file /usr/share/desktop-directories/Internet.directory from install of gnome-menus-2.20.1-1.fc8 conflicts with file from package xfdesktop-acer-lp-1652.mcs_patched
file /usr/share/desktop-directories/Settings.directory from install of gnome-menus-2.20.1-1.fc8 conflicts with file from package xfdesktop-acer-lp-1652.mcs_patched

Error Summary


What does this mean?

I am trying to run unetbootin in root, so that the device name comes up in its proper place. I have formatted the flash drive as FAT. I have installed "p7zip". I have tried a number of different pathnames to unetbootin. My terminal currently has a title bar of "root@localhost:~". The file unetbootin-linux-555 is located in my home directory without intervening directories.

Any suggestions?

What about my critical applications, such as contacts and calendar, switching from linpus to mint? Will the new mint equivalents--I assume there will be some--accept the back-up files from the old linpus system?