(1) The process of making a hard disk or optical disc accessible to the operating system by establishing the pointers to the indexes on the medium. This is an automatic function performed by the operating system when it first finds new drives or media connected to the computer.
(2) To cause a file on a remote workstation or server to be available for access locally. For example, in NFS (Network File System), a server maintains a list of its directories that are available to clients. When a client mounts a directory on the server, that directory and its subdirectories become part of the client's directory hierarchy. See
automounting.