The Office Worker's Guide to a USB Thumb Drive

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1. Example

2. Detecting USB hard drive

After you plug in your USB device to your USB port, linux will add new block device into /dev/ directory. At this stage you are not able to use this device as the USB filesystem needs to be mouted before you are able to retrieve any data. To find out what name your block device file have you can run fdisk command:

# fdisk -l 

You will get output similar to this:

Disk /dev/sdb: 60.0 GB, 60060155904 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7301 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000b2b03

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1        7301    58645251    b  W95 FAT32

3. Creating mount point

Create directory where you want to mount your device:

mkdir /mnt/sdb1 

4. Edit /etc/fstab

To automate this process you can edit /etc/fstab file and add line similar to this:

/dev/sdb1       /mnt/sdb1           vfat    defaults        0       0 

Run mount command to mount all not yet mounted devices. Keep in mind that if you have more different USB devices in you system, device name can vary!!!

# mount -a