As a simple demonstration, we’ll go through mounting a CD-ROM, such as the one you may have used to install Debian. You’ll need to be root to do this, so be careful; whenever you’re root, you have the power to manipulate the whole system, not just your own files. Also, these commands assume there’s a CD in your drive; you should put one in the drive now. Then start with the following command:
If you haven’t already, you need to either log in as root or gain root privileges with the su (super user) command. If you use su, enter the root password when prompted.
Use this command to see what’s in the /cdrom directory before you start. If you don’t have a /cdrom directory, you may have to make one using mkdir /cdrom.
Simply typing mount with no arguments lists the currently mounted filesystems.
For this command, you should substitute the name of your CD-ROM device for CD-device in the above command line. If you aren’t sure, /dev/cdrom is a good guess because the install process should have created this symbolic link on the system. If that fails, try the different IDE devices: /dev/hdc, etc. You should see a message like this: mount: block device /dev/hdc is write-protected, mounting read-only.
The -t option specifies the type of the filesystem, in this case iso9660. Most CDs are iso9660. The next argument is the name of the device to mount, and the final argument is the mount point. There are many other arguments for mount; see the manual page for details.
Once a CD is mounted, you may find that your drive tray will not open. You must unmount the CD before removing it.
Confirms that /cdrom now contains whatever is on the CD in your drive.
Displays the list of filesystems again; notice that your CD drive is now mounted.
This unmounts the CD. It’s now safe to remove the CD from the drive. Notice that the command is umount with no “n,” even though it’s used to unmount the filesystem.
Don’t leave yourself logged on as root. Log out immediately, just to be safe.