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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

> Unix starts at root, which is how nature intended. It does not change characteristics based on media - you can mount a floppy at root if you want.

Why is the root of one of my drives `/` while the roots of my other drives are subdirectories of that first drive?

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Thinking of it in terms of namespaces might help; it's not that the drive is special, it's that there's a view that starts from / and one disk filesystem happens to be dropped there and others are dropped elsewhere; with something like initramfs there aren't any drives on /, just a chunk of ram, though you usually pivot to a physical one later (many linux-based embedded systems don't because your one "drive" is an SD card that can't handle real use, so you just keep the "skeleton" in memory and drop various bits of eMMC or SD or whatever into the tree as-convenient.)

I do get it, I just don't think that the UNIX way is necessarily more natural than the Windows way.

In multiple ways, / doesn't have to be one of your drives.

Because you (or your distro) configured it like that. You don’t have to do it that way.

Only the root of the root filesystem is /

The point is that any filesystem can be chosen as the OS’s root.

The root of all other filesystems - there could be multiple per drive - is where you tell the filesystem to be mounted, or in your automounter’s special directory, usually /run/media, where it makes a unique serial or device path.

* clarity

You can make / be none of your drives, if that's what you wish. Just have a tmpfs and mount things into it.

The mechanism is generic and pretty. The specifics of how it's often used are legacy-driven. Nothing in unix really depends on the specifics.

It's not, it's a shared namespace. It just happens that one of your drives is mounted at / and the others are not.

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