Practice Use drills for recall and labs for real operating judgment.

LAB-DISK-02 - Mounting and Partitions

Understand mounting and partition concepts in a safer practice-oriented way before making live changes to real storage devices.

DSK Storage and Disk Management

Mounting and Partitions

Understand mounting and partition concepts in a safer practice-oriented way before making live changes to real storage devices.

35 min INTERMEDIATE LINUX Curriculum-reviewed
Prerequisites
Lab LAB-DISK-01 - Disk Usage (df and du)
Success criteria
  • Explain what mounting does.
  • Inspect mounted filesystems and storage devices safely.
Safety notes
  • Do not repartition or format real disks for this lab. Keep the work observational unless you are on a disposable training system.

Part A: The Field Guide

Mounting is the act of making a filesystem accessible at a chosen location in the directory tree.

This is different from partitioning and different from formatting.

That difference matters because the risks are different:

  • inspection is low risk
  • mounting changes accessibility
  • formatting or repartitioning can destroy existing data

Safety Rule

If you are not on a disposable training device or VM, keep this lab observational. Understanding the layout is already valuable and much safer than live repartitioning.

Part B: The Drill Deck

Terminal required: focus on inspection first.

G
Guided Step by step - type exactly this and compare the result
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Exercise G1: Inspect the storage layout

  1. Run lsblk
  2. Run mount | head
  3. Run df -h
  4. Compare the device names, mount points, and filesystem usage views

Exercise G2: Find one mount point

  1. Pick one mounted filesystem from df -h
  2. Find the same mount point in mount
  3. Explain how those two commands are describing related parts of the same system state

Exercise G3: Read fstab carefully

  1. Run cat /etc/fstab
  2. Notice that this file describes mount behavior expected at boot
  3. Explain why a mistake here deserves caution even if the syntax looks like simple text
S
Solo Task described, hints available - figure it out
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Exercise S1: Concept separation

In your own words, explain the difference between:

  1. partitioning a disk
  2. formatting a filesystem
  3. mounting a filesystem

Exercise S2: Safe planning mindset

Describe the checks you would do before mounting a new external drive on a real machine.

M
Mission Real scenario - no hints, combine multiple skills
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Mission M1: Write a safe storage checklist

Write a short checklist for any real storage change:

  1. identify the exact device
  2. verify whether data already exists
  3. confirm whether the action is inspection, mount, format, or partition change
  4. back up if needed
  5. verify the result afterward

If that checklist feels natural, the storage teaching is landing correctly.