"Mounting a drive"

[Jerry McAllister]

> 
> Hallo 
> Could  someone  explain  exactly what is meant by "mounting" a disk. I
> understand  that it is making a disk available for use, but would like
> to understand the implications of the term and what abilities it
> confers.

Mounting connects the mount point to the device driver.
After the mount, references to the mount point, cause it to 
talk to the device driver.

> Part  of  the  purpose of the question is that I am trying to find out
> how  I  can  have more partitions and detachable drives than there are
> letters in the alphabet.

I don't know what you mean by detachable drives - do you mean removable,
hot-swap, unmount-able,  whatever?

Any drive - except root can be unmounted.   You can mount only the 
filesystems you want to use at the time, regardless of how many
physical drives are connected to the box.

On each disk device whether single drive or raid, you are allowed up 
to 4 slices (1-4) and within each slice, 8 partitions (a-h).  But, 
partition c is generally reserved.   A partition is turned in to a
filesystem with the newfs(8) utility.  You can have as many drives as 
your controllers can talk to.   

Every filesystem refers to a single partition.   A partition/filesystem
is unseen by the system except for some utilities that talk to devices 
directly such as fsck(8) or dd(1) unless it is mounted.

////jerry

> 
> Best Regards,
> Richard Shoebridge
> 
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