Mounting takes place before a computer can use any kind of storage device (such as a hard drive, CD-ROM, or network share). The user or their operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

 must make it accessible through the computer's file system

File system

A file system is a means to organize data expected to be retained after a program terminates by providing procedures to store, retrieve and update data, as well as manage the available space on the device which contain it. A file system organizes data in an efficient manner and is tuned to the...

. A user can access only files on mounted media.

Mount point

A mount point is a physical location in the partition used as a root filesystem. Many different types of storage exist, including magnetic, magneto-optical, optical, and semiconductor (solid-state) drives. Magnetic media are still the most common (as of 2010) and are available as floppy and hard disk drives. Before any of them can be used for storage, the means by which information is read and written must be organized and knowledge of this must be available to the operating system. The organization is called a filesystem. Each different filesystem provides the host operating system with meta data so that it knows how to read and write data. When the medium (or media, when the filesystem is a volume filesystem as in RAID

RAID

RAID is a storage technology that combines multiple disk drive components into a logical unit...

arrays) is mounted, this meta data is read by the operating system so that it can use the storage.

External links

• Mounting Definition - by The Linux Information Project (LINFO)