Now that the filesystem has been created, you can mount the partition. Initially, it will be empty, since the system hasn't had access to the filesystem for files to have been added to it. The command to mount file systems is the mount command, and its syntax is as follows:
mount [options] <-t type> [-o mount options] <device> <mounting point> |
In this case, we want to temporarily mount our partition on /mnt (or any other mount point you have chosen – remember that the mount point must exist). The command for mounting our newly created partition is:
$ mount -t ext2 /dev/hdb1 /mnt |
The -t option is used to specify what type of file system the partition is supposed to host. The file systems you will most frequently encounter are ext2FS (the GNU/Linux file system), VFAT (for all DOS/Windows partitions: FAT 12, 16 or 32) and ISO9660 (CD-ROM filesystem). If you do not specify any type, mount will try and guess which filesystem is hosted by the partition by reading the superblock.
The -o option is used to specify one or more mounting options. The options appropriate for a particular filesystem will depend on the filesystem being used. Refer to the mount(8) man page for more details.
Now that you've mounted your new partition, it's time to copy the entire /usr directory onto it:
$ (cd /usr && tar cf - .) | (cd /mnt && tar xpvf -) |
Now that the files are copied, we can unmount our partition. To do this, use the umount command. The syntax is simple:
umount <mount point|device> |
So, to unmount our new partition, we can type:
$ umount /mnt |
$ umount /dev/hdb1 |
Since this partition is going to “become” our /usr directory, we need to tell this to the system. To do this, we edit: