Mount a Drive or Partition

Debian KDE

Mount a Drive or Partition

CDs, DVDs and USB Drives

If you put a CD or DVD in the drive, or connect a USB drive, when using Debian KDE, you will get a new window, saying "A new medium has been detected. What do you want to do?" One of the options is "Open in New Window." If you click "OK," it is automatically mounted, and Konqueror file manager starts, so you can access the CD, DVD or USB drive.

Partitions and Hard Drives

If there are partitions on the hard drive, or other hard drives, not used by the operating system, they are not automatically mounted. To access them, you must mount them manually.

List Drives and Partitions

To list information about drives and partitions, open the Root Terminal and type:

fdisk -l

This also enables you to determine if a drive is connected properly and working. If it is not included in this list, it is not connected properly or not working.

Create Directory to Mount Partition

Before mounting a partition, you must have a directory to mount it to.

A partition can be mounted to any directory. For illustration purposes create a new directory called "2" in the "/mnt" directory.

Open the Root Terminal and type:

mkdir /mnt/2

Another option is to open the Root File Manager and make this directory.

Mount the Partition

The partition can be mounted using the Root Terminal, and typing:

mount /dev/(partition) (directory)

Enter appropriate information. Here is one possible example.

mount /dev/sdd1 /mnt/2

Access the Partition

If you open the File Manager, and go to the directory where the partition is mounted, you can have Read Only access.

To have Read and Write access, use the Root File Manager.

Unmount

To unmount the partition you can use either:

umount /dev/(partition)

umount (directory)

Using the example above, it can be:

umount /dev/sdd1

umount /mnt/2

Partitions are also unmounted when the computer is turned off.

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