Complete guide for mounting drives in RHEL/ CentOS

In this tutorial, we are going to discuss how we can mount various devices on a RHEL/CentOS system using command line interface.

To view all the mounts on the system

If we want to see all the devices that are currently mounted on our machine, run

$ mount

To unmount a device

To unmount an already mounted device, run

$ umount mount_point

For example, if a device is mounted at /newdrive & needs to be unmounted, run

$ $ umount /newdrive

Mounting a NFS shared drive

To mount a NFS shared drive on the Linux machine, run

$ mount 192.168.1.100:/nfs_share /newdrive

Here, 192.168.1.100 is the IP address of the machine with NFS & /nfs_share in the name of the folder that has been shared. This again is a temporary mount & we will need to create an entyr in /etc/fstab for the permanent mount

$ vi /etc/fstab 192.168.1.100:/nfs_share /newdrive nfs defaults 0 0

here /newdir, is the mount point for drive that we created.

Mounting a Samba shared drive

There are many ways by which you can access samba shared device on your machine but we will be using mount command. Command to mount a samba share on Linux is ,

$ mount –t smbfs -o username=dan,workgroup=office,password=12345 192.168.1.100:/samba_share /newdir

Here, dan is username to access samba drive with a wotkgroup ‘office’ & password ‘12345’.

192.168.1.100:/samba_share is the samba device address.

To permanently mount a samba drive, open /etc/fstab & create an entry,

$ vi /etc/fstab //192.168.1.100:/samba_share1 /newdir smbfs rw,user,username=dan,password=12345 0 0

Mount a new HDD partition

To mount a new HDD partition with ext4 filessytem on Linux, we will first create a mount point

$ mkdir /newdrive

& then will mount the freshly created partition onto our machine by running,

$ mount /dev/sdb2 /newdrive

Where, /dev/sdb2 is the newly created partition. However the mount will be a temporary mount & the partition will be un-mounted if the system reboots. To permanently a HDD partition, we need to make an entry in /etc/fstab file.

$ vi /etc/fstab /dev/sdb2 /newdrive ext4 defaults 0 0

Mounting a FAT32 based USB drive or HDD

Mounting a USB based drive is similar to mounting a new partition with one exception that we will also need to mention the filesystem when mounting a usb drive. Command for mounting a USB drive is

$ mount –t vfat /dev/sdb1 /newdrive

To permanently mount a ntfs drive on the system, open /etc/fstab file & add

$ vi /etc/fstab /dev/sdb2 /newdrive vfat defaults 0 0

Mounting a NTFS based usb drive or HDD

To mount a NTFS based drive, we need to install package named ‘ntfs-3g’ on our system. This package can be installed using yum by running the following command,

$ yum install ntfs-3g

Once install we can mount the drive,

$ mount –t ntfs /dev/sdb1 /newdrive

To permanently mount a ntfs drive on the system, open /etc/fstab file & add

$ vi /etc/fstab /dev/sdb2 /newdrive ntfs-3g defaults 0 0

Mounting a CD/DVD

To mount a CD/DVD onto the system, run

$ mount -t iso9660 -o ro /dev/cdrom /mnt

Here, /mnt is mount point for CD-Rom. To permanently mount a CD/DVD-rom on the system, open /etc/fstab file & add

$ vi /etc/fstab /dev/cdrom /mnt iso9660 defaults 0 0

Mounting an ISO to system

To mount an ISO to Linux system, run the following command

$ mount -t iso9660 -o loop rhel_X86-64_7.0.1.iso /mnt

To permanently mount an ISO file on the system, open /etc/fstab file & add

$ vi /etc/fstab rhel_X86-64_7.0.1.iso /mnt iso9660 defaults 0 0