Partitions made visible are all mounted on boot.

andyk · 01-30-2004, 03:52 PM

Why are all partitions made by the installation program made visible are mounted at boot in Slackware 9.0? Could the partitions at boot time be unmounted and visible instead and mounted manually afterwards?
Is it made only for the sake of the efsck?
Andy K.

fancypiper · 01-30-2004, 04:23 PM

That depends. All partitions with system files need to be mounted for the system to operate.

Drive/partition configuration is handled by the file /etc/fstab. Comment out any partition you wish not mounted.

# Managing drives
LNAG - Accessing my drives
Rute - Device Mounting

My file:

Code:

# Duron 950 uilleann Red Hat 7.3 /etc/fstab file
/dev/hda7	/               reiserfs	defaults	1 1
/dev/hda3	/boot           ext3		defaults	1 2
none            /dev/pts        devpts		gid=5,mode=620  0 0
/dev/hda9	/home           reiserfs	defaults	1 2
/dev/hda1	/mnt/win98	vfat		defaults	0 0
/dev/hda2	/mnt/win2k	ntfs		defaults	0 0
none            /proc           proc		defaults	0 0
none            /dev/shm        tmpfs		defaults	0 0
/dev/hdb4	/pub            ext3		defaults	1 2
/dev/hdb1	/pub/iso        reiserfs	defaults	1 2
/dev/hdb2	/pub/iso/LinuxDistros   ext3    defaults	1 2
#/dev/hda6	/mnt/gentoo     reiserfs	defaults	1 2
#/dev/hda8	/mnt/mandrake   ext3		defaults	1 2
/dev/hda5	swap            swap		defaults	0 0
/dev/cdrom	/mnt/cdrom	iso9660		noauto,owner,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0        /mnt/floppy     auto		noauto,owner    0 0

Eqwatz · 01-30-2004, 08:07 PM

If you are talking about non-linux partitions--like your windows partitions--some of the installation scripts in some distribututions assume you want access to the windows stuff from Linux.

It isn't really a strain on the resources unless you are severely short on ram. It takes a little space in ram because the filesystem driver modules are loaded into the kernel. We are talking about a couple of kilobytes--not much.

I find it rather convienient myself. I put those entries into /etc/fstab manually in RedHat.

It has been a while since I played with Debian; but if I remember correctly, Debian created mount-points (directories in /mnt) and entries in /etc/fstab to mount windows partitions auto-magically upon boot up.

It has been even longer since I played with Slack, but they may do the same.
You can see that he has some entries commented out in his /etc/fstab. That prevents them from being mounted at boot-up.

Then again, you have me confused with the "visible" thing.