techster82 said:
yeah, thats what i did. I am playing around with the disk utility now trying to figure out this whole mount thing. I appreciate your patience, this is my first mac, and I am trying to do everything I do on my pc. My pc I know like the back of my hand. Mac is a little different.
Maybe this explaination will help. (Warning: long post.)
Under Windows (and MS-DOS before it) each drive is assigned a unique letter to identify the drive. '
C', '
D', etc. with '
A' and '
B' traditionaly reserved for floppy drives. To access a file on Windows you need to know both the drive letter and the path of the file on that drive. For example,
C:\folderA\folderB\somefile.txt, that is drive '
C' and path
\folderA\folderB\.
Using the Windows GUI the distinction between drive letters and paths is blurred but under MS-DOS (and using the command line in modern Windows) you need to perform two operations to access a file. First you need to select the appropriate drive by entering the drive letter followed by a '
:' (eg '
C:'). Second, you
cd to the appropriate directory (eg
cd \folderA\folderB). It is true that you can omit the disk selection step if the file you need to find is on the currently selected drive, but ultimately there are two separate concepts.
Under Unix systems, including OS X, there was a desire to simplify these concepts. Rather than dealing with drives and paths the decision was made to eliminate the need to specify a drive location. The way this works is that you have a single "root" filesystem on a given drive. This drive is typically the boot volume for the computer under OS X.
The boot volume has a bunch of folders stored on it. The top level folder is called '
/' which is also known as the root of the filesystem. Just below the root are the '
Applications', '
Library', and '
System' folders along with various other folders including several hidden folders and files.
When we want to add a new drive to a Unix system instead of allocating a drive letter as happens in Windows, a folder is created in the root filesystem. The system is then configured so that the filesystem on the new drive can be accessed as though the filesystem on the new drive is contained within the folder. The process of making the filesystem available through this folder is called "mounting" a filesystem or disk.
Under OS X, one of the hidden folders in the root volume is named '
Volumes'. When you insert a CD (or connect an external drive) OS X inspects the name of the CD and creates a folder in the
/Volumes folder using the name of the CD and then mounts the CD under this folder. When you drag the CD image to the trashcan OS X unmounts the CD and then removes the folder it created.
For example, when my CD drive is empty then the
/Volumes folder has nothing inside it. If insert a CD named '
Turbo Tax' into the CD drive, OS X creates the folder
/Volumes/TurboTax and then mounts the CD under this folder. OS X will also display an icon for the CD on the desktop and in the left panel of a finder window. When you eject the CD, the icon is removed from the desktop/finder, the filesystem is unmounted and then the folder is removed from
/Volumes.
A .dmg file is an image of a filesystem. That is, a .dmg file can be thought of as a virtual CD. When you double click on the .dmg file OS X treats the .dmg file as if it was a virtual CD that you have inserted into a virtual CD drive. The .dmg file is inspected to get the filesystem name and then a folder is created in
/Volumes and the filesystem is mounted under the new folder. When you eject the mounted filesystem, OS X unmounts the filesystem and removes the folder in
/Volumes.
Many .dmg files are read-only. However, it is possible to create .dmg files that are empty (using DiskUtility) and then copy files into the filesystem stored in the .dmg file.
