Sourcegirl – Adventures in Software, Hardware, Cloud & Mobile

Mounting and Dismounting Disks and Disk Images

In Windows there are several ways to mount and dismount disks, as well in Mac OSX. It’s a bit easier in Mac as there is a built in utility called Disk Utility, but you have to go find it in the Utilities section of Applications (or run from a command line).

For Windows, the easiest way is to use a free utility called MagicDisc. Then you can add and mount discs at your leisure and have them mount on bootup.

For Mac OSX, dismounting a disk is as easy as dragging the icon to the trash. This is counter-intuitive as some people might think they are deleting the contents. For Windows, there is the right-click and disconnect from the windows tray. Or, as I prefer, to use the disk flush utility Sync.

In both the Mac OSX and the Windows cases, the important idea is to flush any pending writes to the contents of the disk before physically disconnecting them, whether these be USB memory sticks or hard disks. Otherwise data corruption is possible.