| Basic Mounting Differences between Windows and Linux 
Posted: 9 Mar 2005
One of the things that confused me most when I switched to Linux was the way
Linux displays the mounted hard drives.
With Windows, at the console
prompt, you see something like this: C:windowssystem When I saw the Linux hard drive structure for the
first time, I was a bit baffled. I couldn't find where the system told me what
drive I was dealing with. All I saw was a bunch of directories. The hard drive
wasn't anywhere in the path. All I saw were things like: /usr/local/bin Linux was quite a bit different. At home, I have a
setup with 3 hard drives and in Windows, I was used to seeing each hard drive in
the command prompt: C:whatever
D:whatever
E:whatever It took me a while to figure out that Linux doesn't show the
actual hard drive, at all, ever. In Linux, there is no "C:" or "D:" There are
instead what are called "mount points".
When you begin the installation
of your favoriate distro, you'll notice the hard drive partition screen most
likely has a section called "Mount Points". This is basically asking you how you
want your hard drive to be displayed in the prompt.
For example: If I
have 3 hard drives and I set the mount points to: /
/usr
/mnt/hd2/music My hard drives would, in essence become those directories.
Instead of switching to the 3rd hard drive by typing in something
like: E: I would simply change to the respective directory by typing in: cd /mnt/hd2/music and as soon as I arrived at the directory, I could
rest assured I was seeing the contents of my third hard drive.
Once you
get the hang of it, it's really quite nice.
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