Mount (computing)

Mounting takes place before a computer can use any kind of storage device (such as a hard drive, CD-ROM, or network share). The user or their operating system must make it accessible through the computer's file system. A user can only access files on mounted media.

Overview

A mount point is a physical 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. As of 2013, 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, this metadata is read by the operating system so that it can use the storage.