Mounting a USB Drive
Access external USB 'thumb' drives (RedHat 7.1/9.0)
Posted 29.04.2004 | Updated 23.05.2006 | Contributed by Matthew Horton & Andy Mallett


Linux is a plug and play operating system. This means it can detect hardware and changes in hardware configuration automatically. This is good news for USB "thumb drive" or "memory stick" afficionados like myself, who like to use removable USB storage media. As soon as you whack the USB drive in, it gets picked up by the system, as a "SCSI device" as it turns out..

Linux autodetecting USB drive

Note the above line Attached scsi removable disk sdb..

Like Unix, Linux keeps devices in the /dev directory and it's not unusual for some non-SCSI devices to be given SCSI credentials: sd = SCSI Device. each device is then identified with a third letter, sda, sdb, sdc, etc. So the path to our newly found USB drive's hardware entry in the system would be /dev/sdb.

Like all drives, it cannot be used unless it is mounted first however. Mounting just makes a drive available for use by allocating it a directory, usually in the /mnt directory.

M'mann Matty Horton is also fond of lobbing his drive into various places has done some research and came up with the following procedure:
  • Log in as root and insert USB drive. The Linux OS should identify the drive as above
  • Type this at the command console:

    mkdir   -p   /mnt/usbdrive  ;mount   -tvfat   /dev/sda   /mnt/usbdrive
This will make a directory in /mnt called usbdrive and will then mount the drive into this directory. Note sdb is the identified USB device from the top screen and fat is the FAT16 file system (see below). You can then copy files to and from the drive using the /mnt/usbdrive directory.

File Systems

Matt and I did it with Red Hat 7.1 and Red Hat 9.0 and found that 7.1 supports the FAT16 files system on thumb drives and 9.0 supports Fat16 and Fat32. Really there's no reason why a USB thumb drive can't be formatted as FAT16 - at their current size there's no significant cluster wastage and this will ensure compatibility with RH7..

Formatting the USB drive

I have also had success in swapping my USB drive into a MAC running OSX, but again had to go from FAT32 to FAT16 for this to happen. To unmount the drive for removal, type the following at the command console:

umount   /mnt/usbdrive

Make sure you're not still logged into the /mnt/usbdrive before doing this.



- M&A.