# /Linux mount point vs. Letter drives in Windows



## briaalex (Oct 19, 2004)

What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of Unix/Linux mount point vs. Letter drives in windows in reference to user familiarity, transparency, and security?


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## tsunam (Sep 14, 2003)

Lets see for starters...mount point have permission levels...windows Drive letter's basically don't. Permissions are everyone has everything on that C: drive. Security wise the mount point is again greater because of said permission levels.

Obiviously a disadvantage is that you have to make mount points/remember what you called them.


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## mattach (Aug 9, 2004)

Quick Question:

If i had a secondary drive in 3 partitions (2 FAT32, 1 NTFS) as my slave drive on a WinXP/Fedora dual boot, how would you mount the fat32 partitions in fedora? would linux mess up permissions or anything like that for winxp?


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## lynch (Aug 3, 2002)

Windows has to mount it's partitions and drives, too; they just do it automatically.


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## Whiteskin (Nov 16, 2002)

Another thing is that you can change the way a system is easily. For example, let's say you have a server running, with two drives. One is dedicated to your user (home) directories, the other is... everything else. 

Now, if your home drive dies, for some reason, you can simply drop it, install a new drive, and put back in your backed up data (assuming you back up... right?). Windows can do something similar, but here's another interesting thing. You can mount a drive onto a sub mount point, inside a locked directory. This means you could lock off acess to certain drives by simply mounting them to a protected or home directory. 

I've never tried this, but apparently a simple way to hide data temporarily is to just mount a small blank partition overtop of a directory. This hides the directory from view, filling it only with that drive. Acess the hidden data by simply unmounting the drive.


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