mounting and unmounting

[slash]

what is the difference when a hard drive is mounted and when it is unmounted?

[AR]

erm...
When a hard drive is mounted, you can access it through the VFS, when it isn't you can't.

ie. /dev/hda1 is a device, unless you want to read it byte by byte it isn't very useful. But you can mount it, "mount -t reiserfs /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1" then you can access the contents via /mnt/hda1/*. It's also useful to note that you should always umount removal media since that also flushes the buffer (since writes aren't neccessarily atomic)

[Pype.Clicker]

dude, that was probably the last place to ask. this is not a LUG. tnx.