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Concept
Mount (computing)
Summary
Mounting is a process by which a computer's operating system makes and directories on a storage device (such as hard drive, CD-ROM, or network share) available for users to access via the computer's .
In general, the process of mounting comprises the operating system acquiring access to the storage medium; recognizing, reading, and processing file system structure and metadata on it before registering them to the (VFS) component.
The location in the VFS to which the newly mounted medium was registered is called a "mount point"; when the mounting process is completed, the user can access files and directories on the medium from there.
An opposite process of mounting is called unmounting, in which the operating system cuts off all user access to files and directories on the mount point, writes the remaining queue of user data to the storage device, refreshes file system metadata, then relinquishes access to the device, making the storage device safe for removal.
Normally, when the computer is shutting down, every mounted storage device will undergo an unmounting process to ensure that all queued data was written to it, and to preserve the integrity of the file system structure on the media.
A mount point is a location in the partition used as a root filesystem. Many different types of storage exist, including magnetic, magneto-optical, optical, and semiconductor (solid-state) drives. , magnetic media are still the most common and are available as hard disk drives and, less frequently, floppy disks. Before any of them can be used for storage, the means by which information is read and written must be organized and knowledge of this must be available to the operating system. The organization is called a filesystem. Each different filesystem provides the host operating system with metadata so that it knows how to read and write data. When the medium (or media, when the filesystem is a volume filesystem as in RAID arrays) is mounted, these metadata are read by the operating system so that it can use the storage.
Official source
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