Whenever you add a volume to your filesystem, whether it be a CD or a hard drive partition or a floppy disk, it is "mounted". As long as a device is mounted, then the filesystem has access to it. When a filesystem is mounted, you don't want to remove it, lest you risk data corruption. In order to remove a device safely, it needs to be unmounted, which means that I/O operations are completed, then the media is removed from the filesystem.
If you've ever used a thumbdrive in Windows, you may have noticed that it had to be "safely removed". That is simply the unmounting process in a different OS.
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Windows [n.] - A thirty-two bit extension and GUI shell to a sixteen bit patch to an eight bit operating system originally coded for a four bit microprocessor and sold by a two-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition.
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