Sometimes a USB external drive may not mount in Linux, could be because the the harddrive is getting to that point of I am going to give up soon so you better copy off all of the data!!!!..
Anyway, here are some basic guides to mount a external harddrive if it has not been auto mounted by udev
If you do a dmesg on the command line
dmesg [ 4454.972580] scsi 6:0:0:0: Direct-Access Maxtor 4 D040H2 0811 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 [ 4454.973682] sd 6:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0 [ 4454.980992] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] 80043264 512-byte logical blocks: (40.9 GB/38.1 GiB) [ 4454.983014] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Test WP failed, assume Write Enabled [ 4454.983021] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through [ 4454.985201] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Test WP failed, assume Write Enabled [ 4454.985205] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through [ 4454.985209] sdc: sdc1 [ 4455.022214] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Test WP failed, assume Write Enabled [ 4455.022218] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through [ 4455.022224] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI disk |
and get something like the above, the most interesting part is the sdc:sdc1, because this tells you where the device has been placed onto the /dev directory structure. You could also use the
lsusb |
to find out where it was placed in the USB structure as well and try to mount from that device entry, but I just use the /dev/sdc ones normally, both will work through.
To mount a external drive, you need to find somewhere to place it, e.g. /mnt and then create a directory (that is not there already)
cd /mnt mkdir USBEXT |
and then mount the USB external drive, most are the type of V/FAT types so you just specify that in the type (-t) parameter
mount -t vfat /dev/sdc1 /mnt/USBEXT |
the /dev/sdc1 is where it was placed and the /mnt/USBEXT was where I want it mounted and the -t was VFAT.