This has to do with disk caching. What you read and work with is stored in
RAM. Linux writes it back to the disk when it is convenient to do so. It
shouldn't affect a cdrom, which is read only, but can cause problems for a
floppy if you remove it from the drive before Linux has a chance to write
back any changes you may have made.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Neilesh Patel
> Sent: Monday, August 09, 1999 11:02 AM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: [newbie] Accessing Floppy / CDROM Disks
>
>
> why do you have to unmount the filesystem before taking the CD or floppy
> out?
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Thomas J. Hamman
> Sent: Monday, August 09, 1999 9:15 AM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: RE: [newbie] Accessing Floppy / CDROM Disks
>
>
>
> 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
>
