Mount Points

A mount point is a directory which a device or partition is attached to. During your install you may need to choose mount points for specific filesystems. You will need to set the mountpoint of "/" for your root filesystem on the disk partition you are installing your system to. For example if you are installing your system on the second partition of an IDE drive, you will select the "/dev/hda2" drive mount point to be "/".

If you want to mount other drives or partitions, you may, for example, mount your second hard drive or partition to a directory called "/data". Once your install is complete you will need to be sure this mount point exists and possibly create it with the "mkdir /data" command. Then the next time you boot your system, this partition should be available for use (or you can use the command "mount -a" to mount all filesystems in the /etc/fstab file.

How to mount
Mounting is done with the mount command.

When mounting, you must tell the mount command what is the device or partition you want to mount and what is the mount point. The mount point must be a directory that already exists on your system. For example, to mount your floppy:

$ mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy

In this example, /dev/fd0 is your floppy drive, and /mnt/floppy is the mount point. Now when you access /mnt/floppy, you'll actually access the files on your floppy.

Usually /dev/fd0 is your floppy drive, although some distros are configured so that /dev/floppy is the same thing as /dev/fd0. Usually your CD-ROM is configured the same way: /dev/cdrom is your CD-ROM device (or, more specifically, /dev/floppy is a symbolic link to your actual floppy drive, and /dev/cdrom is a symbolic link to your CD-ROM drive).