Floppies and CD-ROMs

KDE and Gnome automatically mount CD-Roms for use 

Friday, March 07, 2003

Unlike Windows, Linux requires floppies and CDs to be “mounted” before use. To use a floppy or CD you must assign a directory to it. This is called mounting. Linux assigns standard mount points for floppy and CD-ROM as /mnt/floppy and /mnt/cdrom respectively. In case you have a second floppy drive, its mount point will be /mnt/floppy1 and a second CD-ROM drive or CD Writer, will mount at /mnt/cdrom1.Unmounting (the opposite of mount) is sometimes required, like when you want to eject a mounted CD-ROM. 

If you are using GNOME, the moment you insert a CD-ROM it is mounted. GNOME also launches the file browser showing the contents of the CD . 

To unmount the CD, right click on the CD-ROM icon on the desktop and select eject. Floppies are mounted from the command line. In KDE, click the respective icons on the desktop after inserting the media.To unmount, right click on the icon and select Unmount. 

To mount floppies and CD-ROM from the command line, issue the following command in the Linux console or a terminal window within X.

#mount /mnt/cdrom
#mount /mnt/floppy

To unmount, the commands are:

#umount /mnt/cdrom
#umount /mnt/floppy

Shekhar Govindarajan

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