How To Mount and Unmount File Systems In Linux?

How To Mount and Unmount File Systems In Linux?

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Linux operating systems can mount different file systems in order to store data, files, and folders. Mount operation is attaching a specified disk or partition into the specified path of the Linux root file system. Linux and all its distributions provide the mount command in order to mounts file systems and umount in order to unmount the already mounted file system.

mount Command Syntax

The mount command or tool is installed by default. The mount command has the following syntax.

mount OPTION SOURCE DESTINATION
  • OPTION is the mount options which can be used to specify file system type etc. This option is optional.
  • SOURCE is the source partition or disk which will be mounted into the DESTINATION.
  • DESTINATION is the local path where newly mounted partition or disk can be accessed.

List Mounted File Systems

The mount command can be used to list allready mounted filesystems. Linux is a file based operating system which provides a lot of mounts. But we need to list only /dev related mounts to list. 

mount
/dev/sda3 on / type ext4 (rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro)
/dev/sda2 on /boot/efi type vfat (rw,relatime,fmask=0077,dmask=0077,codepage=437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,errors=remount-ro)
  • “/dev/sda3” is the source partitions which is 4th partition of the sda drive.
  • / is the destination mount point which is root.
  • ext4 is the file system type.
  • (rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro) is the mount options.

List Disks and Partitions

Before mounting file systems the existing disks and partitions can be listed with different commands. The lsblk is a modern Linux command which lists disks and partitions on the Linux system.

lsblk
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
 loop0    7:0    0    51M  1 loop /snap/snap-store/518
 loop1    7:1    0 217,9M  1 loop /snap/gnome-3-34-1804/60
 loop2    7:2    0  55,4M  1 loop /snap/core18/1932
 loop3    7:3    0  64,4M  1 loop /snap/gtk-common-themes/1513
 loop4    7:4    0  64,8M  1 loop /snap/gtk-common-themes/1514
 loop6    7:6    0    51M  1 loop /snap/snap-store/498
 loop7    7:7    0  55,4M  1 loop /snap/core18/1944
 loop8    7:8    0  31,1M  1 loop /snap/snapd/10238
 loop9    7:9    0  31,1M  1 loop /snap/snapd/10492
 sda      8:0    0   120G  0 disk 
 ├─sda1   8:1    0     1M  0 part 
 ├─sda2   8:2    0   513M  0 part /boot/efi
 └─sda3   8:3    0 119,5G  0 part /
 sr0     11:0    1  1024M  0 rom

Mount Disk or Partition

The mount operation by default requires root privileges. We can provide the root privileges with the sudo command. The “/dev/sdb” is the disk we will mount into the “/mnt”.

sudo mount /dev/sdb /mnt

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