The I.T. Advisory

Hello everyone,

If you are a Linux or UNIX users, you know that Open Source community can be a huge help when it comes down to getting things done, Personally I like to believe that this is partly because they want you to move away from Micro$oft, and because they just like to help :).

Today I will briefly discuss how to mount devices in Linux.  You may need to mount devices for different reason, maybe add a second hard drive for data storage, add a cdrom or other media devices.

Mounting a device is typically pretty easy. The important part is know what to mount, and where to mount it. Let’s mount a usb hard drive shall we?

1. Hook up your usb hard drive to any open usb port on your host machine
2. Once the device is hooked up, let’s find it.
3. Issues the command fdisk -l (the -l switch is used to list all devices
4. Find your device in the list, typically a USB device will be listed as /dev/sda or dev/sdb sda being the first usb device connected.
5. let’s make a directory locally to mount this device to. Issue the command mkdir /mnt/usb1
6. Let us make sure the directory was properly created; ls /mnt - you should now see the directory usb1 there.
7. Now to mount the device /dev/sda issue: mount -t auto /dev/sda /mnt/usb1 Now, all should go well, we use the -t auto option to try and automatically guess the usb hard drives file system, however you may need to specify it at times, for instance with a windows ntfs drive, we would issue mount -t ntfs /dev/sda /mnt/usb1 (Note: You may download and install some common tools like mkfsutils and and fsutils)
8. Now you should be able to navigate to /mnt/usb1 and issues the ls command to see some files on there. Remember though, when you mount a windows file system, you may only write to fat based drives using the mount command mount -t vfat /dev/sda /mnt/usb1 for NTFS systems there are experimental tools available via searching google.

That’s it everyone, I hope you enjoyed this mini tip of the day!