Author Topic: How do I mount a USB Device (eg Flash Stick) on Linux? (Read 18078 times)

johntaylor · « **on:** January 19, 2004, 10:36:55 AM »

I purchased a usb flash stick a couple of months ago and I am wondering how to mount them as a drive on RedHat Linux 9. Previously I have only been able to mount the disk on windows or mac.

And just out of curosity is possible and how would I boot off the disk?

Any comments / ideas?

keen_prat · « **Reply #1 on:** January 19, 2004, 12:20:34 PM »

Now most of the modern distro have truly "plug and play' support for USB devices. If you plug your flash device it will get automatically detected and all the necessary value will be entered to fstab. Your drive should mounted under /mnt/flash

Try this if it is not configured automatically then ask here again..

johntaylor · « **Reply #2 on:** January 20, 2004, 12:04:34 AM »

I can't exactly do it atm because my new computer I would normally use for linux doesn't turn on and it is the only one that has usb / linux. I should have it going today / tomorrow (Tuesday/Wednesday). I will look then. My old pc has been converted to a RH9 server and is working like a dream compared to my old Windows server!

And how would I boot off it?

Ricky · « **Reply #3 on:** January 20, 2004, 12:27:14 PM »

for booting you need your motherboard to have boot support.. then u have to use dd command to copy boot sector to the flash device..
Man i have not done such thing .. but it will done as i m saying..

arcane7828 · « **Reply #4 on:** June 13, 2004, 08:54:28 AM »

can't mount at the moment either,

to boot from usb, your mother board must support booting from usb port, not all comps support that

standard boot points are floppy, cdrom, hdd

arcane7828 · « **Reply #5 on:** June 13, 2004, 09:10:22 AM »

found the answer off another website

1. make a folder in /mnt

mkdir /mnt/usbdrive
(you can subsitute usbdrive with anything)

2. open fstab using you favourite editor

fstab is located here:
/etc/fstab

3. Insert following line
/dev/sda1 /mnt/usbdrive vfat noauto,user,rw 0 0
(replace "usbdrive" as required)

4. Plug in your usbdrive

5. Run the following command

mount /mnt/usbdrive

6. enter the drive

cd /mnt/usbdrive

7. Run the following command to see what is on the drive or you can just open from the icon on the desktop

ls -al

Hmmm dun think it answers the original question (was on fedora?), but I found that little tutorial on mounting usb on RH9 quite useful =)

Ricky · « **Reply #6 on:** June 13, 2004, 11:49:20 AM »

Well.. If your kernel is not well compiled to have support for USB then u cant mount it simply by above methoud

arcane7828 · « **Reply #7 on:** June 13, 2004, 03:59:21 PM »

true,

there is aslight bug though, I forgot to mention, once I mounted it, I can't umount it from the same terminal (it keeps saying the device is busy), but closing the original terminal and opening a new terminal solved that.