I think I may know the answer to this but I wanted to know for sure. /mnt/win is a directory on my Linux harddrive. When I mount windows and then look at my windows partition via linux is windows really in that /mnt/win directory on my LINUX drive or am I looking at /mnt/win and windows in memory. What I mean is that when i SEE windows from /mnt/win directory which is obviously a directory on my Linux partition are all those windows files really on my Linux partition within /mnt/win or is /mnt/win just a mount point in memory?


thank you

/mnt/win is a file on your linux partition

when you use it as a mount point then by looking in the file you see what's mounted there

the files are on the mounted partition, the folder is a file on the linux partition

You are actually viewing your Windows partition. They are not on you Linux partition any more than other's files are on your harddisk when you view someone else's share over a network. The files are on your Windows partition still. It is just that you are viewing them in the /mnt/win directory... for example:
If you mount your Windows 'C' drive to /mnt/win_1 and you mount it to /mnt/win_2, you are viewing exactly the same Windows partition, but it takes up no more space for having been mounted twice! It is all due to Linux's heritage.

Well, when issue mount command it mounts a scpecified partition on a specified mount point, so the files in mount point are real as in physical and virtual sense. You mount a chunk of your hardrive, that chunk is limited by a starting block size and ending block size, so everything in the range of start and end is mounted for your convinience in the mount point. Once you umount the partition the data is still on HDD but no longer seen in the mounted point. I hope it squares the confusion away b/c Windows make mounts seemless for you, when you open up Windows Explorer and see the letter for your CD-ROM it is just a "mount point", when you put CD in and click on the drive letter for your CD windows takes care of mounting it itself, in linux the life seems to be easier with supermount bits, but it never worked for me, so I don't know, as for your / for instance it gets mounted on boot up before the kernel loads, because system must know where to look for kernel.

Ok I get it I think ... so when I look at 'winbloze' and see my .mp3's those mp3's aren't actually on my Linux partition in the /mnt/win directory?? Or is /mnt/win a 'file' in RAM that contains the names of the files in windows and then references them by way of the file and takes the data from my actual physical windows partition?

thanks alot guys

win on linux is an actual file on the linux hard drive in the mnt folder which by the way is also a file on the linux drive in /


basically everything you see is a file

if you look at the proc folder those files exist only in memory

You are just looking at that part of your hard drive. You mount something to make it readable, that's all. Whatever your mount point is, is so you have somewhere to go look at this info. It's the info on the actual hd though...

If that makes anymore sense than anything else, probably not...

Cool