On 09-Aug-99 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Ok, I know this may sound really dumb but I cannot find anywhere how to
> access a floppy or cdrom disk. I have both "Floppy" and "CDROM" listed in
> the "Mount" directory, but if I try to go into the directory and do an "ls",
> I get nothing. I know I must be doing something really wrong, but I don't
> know what it is.
In Linux you have to mount the drive first. You mount the drive once the
disk/CD is in, then always unmount before you take the disk/CD out. A typical
mount command looks like this:
mount -t <filesystem> <device> <mount-directory>
e.g.
mount -t ext2 /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
would mount the fd0 device (that's the first floppy drive), in the /mnt/floppy
directory, assuming the disk in the drive has a Linux ext2 filesystem. (Usually
though with floppy and CD drives you can use 'auto' as the file system, and
mount will detect which filesystem the disk/CD is using.) IMPORTANT: Before
taking the disk out of the drive in that example, you'd want to type 'umount
/mnt/floppy' (you can omit the device and filesystem from the umount command) to
unmount the disk.
Now, there's a file in the /etc directory called fstab which holds
configuration information for your mountable drives. Assuming you have just
one floppy drive and one CDROM drive, you probably already have proper settings
for your drives in fstab, which means in the mount command you can omit the
filesystem option and either the device or directory options, because mount can
get the rest of the needed info from /etc/fstab.
So you can probably just type:
mount /mnt/floppy (or mount /dev/fd0)
to mount a floppy disk, and:
mount /mnt/cdrom (or mount /dev/cdrom)
to mount a CD.
-Tom
