To access a file on a Unix-like machine, the file system that contains it needs to be mounted with the mount command. Mount is frequently used for movable storage devices such as SD cards, DVDs, etc...
The mount command instructs the operating system that a file system is ready to use, and associates it with a particular point in the overall file system hierarchy (its mount point) and sets options relating to its access. Mounting makes file systems, files, directories, devices and special files available for use and available to the user.
Its counterpart, umount, does exactly the opposite.
Both mount and umount require root user persmissions.
To display all mounted partitions just write mount.
This command will mount the second partition of a HDD:
mount /dev/hda2 /media/PHOTOS
and will unmount (by referring to the physical disk partition):
umount /dev/hda2
or (by referring to the mount point):
umount /media/PHOTOS

Flags

  • -d: Causes everything to be done except for the actual system call. This option is useful in conjunction with the -v flag to determine what the mount command is trying to do.
  • -v: Verbose mode. (Gives additional detail during the mount process)
  • -f: Forces the revocation of write access when trying to downgrade a filesystem mount status from read-write to read-only.
  • -u: The -u flag indicates that the status of an already mounted file system should be changed. Any of the options discussed above (the -o option) may be changed; also a file system can be changed from read-only to read-write or vice versa. An attempt to change from read-write to read-only will fail if any files on the filesystem are currently open for writing unless the -f flag is also specified.
  • -w: Mount the file system read-write.
  • -o: Options are specified with a -o flag followed by a comma separated string of options. The following options are available:
    • noexec: Do not allow execution of any binaries on the mounted file system. This option is useful for a server that has file systems containing binaries for architectures other than its own.
    • noowners: Ignore the ownership field for the entire volume. This causes all objects to appear as owned by user ID 99 and group ID 99. User ID 99 is interpreted as the current effective user ID, while group ID 99 is used directly and translates to ``unknown''.
    • nobrowse: This option indicates that the mount point should not be visible via the GUI (It will not appear on the Desktop as a separate volume).