Christopher Juckins

This is an old revision of the document!

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http://linuxcommando.blogspot.com/2007/12/how-to-mount-usb-flash-drive-from.html

Mounting a USB flash drive in GNOME (or another Linux desktop environment) is as easy as plug and play. Yet, occasionally, you need to mount one on a server which does not run X, then you must know how to do it on the command line.

  Become root.

  $ sudo -s

  Plug in USB drive to a USB port.

  Identify the correct partition name corresponding to the USB drive.

  For my Debian system, it is sda, and partition 1.

  $ dmesg |grep -i 'SCSI device'
  ...
  SCSI device sda: 3903488 512-byte hdwr sectors (1999 MB)

  Alternatively,

   $ grep  SCSI /var/log/messages
  ...
  Dec  1 11:52:26 tiger kernel: SCSI device sda: 3903488 512-byte hdwr sectors (1999 MB)

  Mount the partition to an existing mount point (directory).

  $ mkdir -p /mnt/myusb
  $ mount -t vfat -o rw,users /dev/sda1 /mnt/myusb

  users give non-root users the ability to unmount the drive.

  You can verify the drive is indeed mounted as follows:

   $ mount

  You should see a line in the output that looks like:

  /dev/sda1 on /mnt/myusb type vfat (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)

To retrieve the USB drive:

  You must unmount the partition before physically unplugging the USB device.

  $ umount /mnt/myusb

  You can run the mount command again (with no argument) to verify that the volume is indeed mounted.

  Unplug USB drive.