[SOLVED] Manually mounting USB flash drive

[Nicholas Escalona]

Linux noob here. I'm trying to manually mount my USB drive while running Arch Linux on LiveCD. What follows is the new output I get from lsusb when drive is inserted.



Bus 002 Device 007: ID 05dc:a430 Lexar Media, Inc.


So the drive is recognized. It seems to be located at /dev/sdf, with the lone partition at /dev/sdf1. The drive is consistently assigned here. I said ls /dev | grep -i "sd" twice to get the difference.

So, how can I mount the drive? I'd like to mount it to /mnt/usbflash, which I've already created.

[jerome1232]

mkdir /mnt/usbflash
mount /dev/sdf1 /mnt/usbflash

You will probably need to be root to do this.

To unmount it (always unmount before you remove the flashdrive from it's port)

umount /mnt/usbflash

[Nicholas Escalona]

[root@archlive ~]# mkdir /mnt/usbflash
[root@archlive ~]# mount /dev/sdf1 /mnt/usbflash
mount: you must specify the filesystem type
[root@archlive ~]# mount -t auto /dev/sdf1 /mnt/usbflash
mount: you must specify the filesystem type
[root@archlive ~]# mount -t usbfs /dev/sdf1 /mnt/usbflash
[root@archlive ~]# ls /mnt/usbflash
001 002 003 004 005 devices

I know these are not the correct contents of the drive.

[procras]

[root@archlive ~]# mkdir /mnt/usbflash
[root@archlive ~]# mount /dev/sdf1 /mnt/usbflash
mount: you must specify the filesystem type
[root@archlive ~]# mount -t auto /dev/sdf1 /mnt/usbflash
mount: you must specify the filesystem type
[root@archlive ~]# mount -t usbfs /dev/sdf1 /mnt/usbflash
[root@archlive ~]# ls /mnt/usbflash
001 002 003 004 005 devices

I know these are not the correct contents of the drive.

Most usb pens are formatted in fat32 or some such.
You can check the type it is formatted to using gparted or fdisk

Also I would suggest looking at the messages in syslog when you plug in the pen etc. Open a terminal and try tail -f /var/log/syslog

[vanadium]

The mount command should be able to recognize the file system type. THat it does not might indicate problems with the partition table and/or file system on the USB.

To make sure how your USB is seen, use the command "sudo fdisk -l" (with the USB inserted). You can indeed try mounting specifying "vfat" or "msdos" as file systems.

[Nicholas Escalona]

Thanks all, I resolved the problem. The drive was actually appearing under /dev/sdb, so I mounted /dev/sdb1 and guessed VFAT and it worked.