SOLIDGOLD24
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Mount Hard Drive
Could someone please describe in detail what exactly is happening when I mount my external hard drive in Mac OS X? What is the purpose of mounting my external hard drive? Is mounting the same in a Windows environment? Please any information would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
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To put it simply, mounting is the process of making the drive available to the operating system. In the simplest terms, it is the same for any operating system and is required in order to access any drive whether external or internal. Internal drives are mounted during the boot up process. Although it is possible to unmount/remount an internal drive while the system is running, it is not recommended. External drives, if available during boot up, will also be mounted at that time. Otherwise, they are mounted when the drive becomes available. During mounting, the drive is added to the root tree and remains available without any special commands or routines.