Still fairly new to the linux thing. I'm a little confused about something.

How does Linux deal with drives? such as CDrom and such.

I'm used to drive letters.

Someone please explain this whole mounting business

Thanks.

Ok, Linux sees your drives as partitions. It sees your cd and floppy as removable media under /mnt. For example in windows your drive was c: and all the directories in it were listed after c: , in linux you partitions are set up as one directory tree so where root is /. Now root would be like the root of a tree all of the files in linux go up the tree from there. So now instaed of finding a file using c:\ whatever in dos it is from root (/) and it goes up from there. So in linux it sees all your partitions as one big drive so to say.

Hope I was a help!

linux does not used drive designations instead all files accessible in a Unix system are arranged in one big tree, the file hierarchy, rooted at /. These files can be spread out over several devices. The mount command serves to attach the file system found on some device to the big file tree and it opens file buffers for reading / writing to the device. linux delays writing to the device and so before you eject a floppy or flash drive you need to write anything pending and that is what the umount command does.

Mandrake uses the /mnt directory for removable media and other devices that are not normally part of the OS. The first found CD device will be mounted to /mnt/cdrom. In addition Mandrake uses supermount where when a CD is inserted it is automatically mounted and after certain time period is automatically unmounted when the media is ejected.

The /etc/fstab file tells linux where to mount devices on boot and provides for other options. See man pages for mount and fstab.

alrite. thanks guys that definetly clears some stuff up.