Mounting a USB drive

lil guide for how tf to mount stuff on linux, as it was missing from my notes. based on this article

Connect, then identify the drive

The lsblk command provides a simple list of all block devices known to the system.

Scan the output from lsblk and look for a /dev/sdX device close to the drive size you expect – that’s likely your USB drive. Make a note of the full device name like /dev/sdb1.

For more details, the fdisk utility provides a better overview and more information:

sudo fdisk -l

Now that we know the device node, such as /dev/sdb1, we need a mount point – the specific directory where we‘ll attach the drive.

Mounting the drive

The Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard recommends /media for removable media. We can create a subdirectory there like:

sudo mkdir /media/USBDRIVE

Note: as is done above, you have to create the mountpoint as a folder.

Use the mount command to attach your drive to the desired mountpoint:

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /media/THICK

Note: the numeral after sdX is important; it might specify the partition? The command will probably fail without that—it did just now.

Unmounting the drive safely

sudo umount /dev/sda1

Automatically mounting the drive

Linux can automatically mount our exFAT drive whenever it’s connected.

The easiest and universal method is adding an entry to your /etc/fstab file. It contains a list of disks and partitions along with their mount points and options.

The basic syntax for a new entry of /etc/fstab:

# my THICK usb drive (1.8TB)
UUID="5018-37D7" /media/THICK   exfat   defaults        0       0

Let‘s break this down:

• UUID=DRIVE_UUID – A unique ID assigned to the drive partition
• /media/THICK – The directory to mount to
• exfat – The filesystem type
• defaults – Common mount options (rw, suid, dev, exec, auto, nouser, async)
• 0 0 – Dump and pass numbers. Always 0 for removable media

To get the UUID, run:

sudo blkid