How To Mount USB flash drive from Command Line

Mounting a USB flash drive in GNOME (or another Linux desktop environment) is as easy as plug and play. Yet, occasionally, you need to mount one on a server which does not run X, then you must know how to do it on the command line.

1. Become root.
   
   

   $ sudo -s

   
   


2. Plug in USB drive to a USB port.
   


3. Identify the correct partition name corresponding to the USB drive.
   
   For my Debian system, it is sda, and partition 1.
   

   $ dmesg |grep -i 'SCSI device'
   ...
   SCSI device sda: 3903488 512-byte hdwr sectors (1999 MB)
   

   
   Alternatively,
   

    $ grep  SCSI /var/log/messages
   ...
   Dec  1 11:52:26 tiger kernel: SCSI device sda: 3903488 512-byte hdwr sectors (1999 MB)
   



4. Mount the partition to an existing mount point (directory).
   
   

   $ mkdir -p /mnt/myusb
   $ mount -t vfat -o rw,users /dev/sda1 /mnt/myusb
   

   
   users give non-root users the ability to unmount the drive.
   
   You can verify the drive is indeed mounted as follows:
   

    $ mount

   
   You should see a line in the output that looks like:
   

   
   /dev/sda1 on /mnt/myusb type vfat (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)

To retrieve the USB drive:

1. You must unmount the partition before physically unplugging the USB device.
   
   

   
   $ umount /mnt/myusb

   
   You can run the mount command again (with no argument) to verify that the volume is indeed mounted.


2. Unplug USB drive.