Linux Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples - v1.32, by Dr. Herong Yang
Mount USB Drive as File System
Provides a tutorial example on how to mount the formatted partition of a USB drive on a Linux system as a file system.
If you have a USB drive, you can insert it into a USB socket on your Linux system, and follow this tutorial to mount it as a new file system.
1. Check existing SCSI disk devices represented as /dev/sd* files:
herong$ ls -l /dev/sd* brw-rw----. 1 root disk 8, 0 Mar 26 21:17 /dev/sda brw-rw----. 1 root disk 8, 1 Mar 26 21:17 /dev/sda1 brw-rw----. 1 root disk 8, 2 Mar 26 21:17 /dev/sda2 brw-rw----. 1 root disk 8, 5 Mar 26 21:17 /dev/sda5 brw-rw----. 1 root disk 8, 6 Mar 26 21:17 /dev/sda6 brw-rw----. 1 root disk 8, 7 Mar 26 21:17 /dev/sda7
2. Insert the USB drive in a USB socket. And check SCSI disk devices again. Since USB drives are considered as SCSI disk devices on Linux system. You will see more devices are detected and represented as /dev/sd* files. In my example below, I see /dev/sdb representing the USB as a single storage as a whole, and /dev/sdb1 representing the first FAT32 formatted partition.
herong$ ls -l /dev/sd* brw-rw----. 1 root disk 8, 0 Mar 26 21:17 /dev/sda brw-rw----. 1 root disk 8, 1 Mar 26 21:17 /dev/sda1 brw-rw----. 1 root disk 8, 2 Mar 26 21:17 /dev/sda2 brw-rw----. 1 root disk 8, 5 Mar 26 21:17 /dev/sda5 brw-rw----. 1 root disk 8, 6 Mar 26 21:17 /dev/sda6 brw-rw----. 1 root disk 8, 7 Mar 26 21:17 /dev/sda7 brw-rw----. 1 root disk 8, 16 Apr 4 02:25 /dev/sdb brw-rw----. 1 root disk 8, 17 Apr 4 02:25 /dev/sdb1
3. Find a mounting point on the root file system on my CentOS 8 computer, and mount the USB formatted partition device, /dev/sdb1. You may see different mounting points on other Linux systems. By the way, you can not mount /dev/sdb, because it is not a formatted file system.
herong$ ls -l / lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 7 May 10 2019 bin -> usr/bin dr-xr-xr-x. 6 root root 4096 Mar 26 21:18 boot drwxr-xr-x. 20 root root 3700 Apr 4 08:25 dev drwxr-xr-x. 144 root root 8192 Mar 30 07:37 etc drwxr-xr-x. 3 root root 20 Mar 26 17:11 home lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 7 May 10 2019 lib -> usr/lib drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 6 May 10 2019 media drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 6 May 10 2019 mnt drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 6 May 10 2019 opt ... herong$ ls -l /media total 0 herong$ sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /media
4. Verify the formatted partition of the USB drive as a mounted file system:
herong$ df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on ... /dev/sdb1 7813124 1146116 6667008 15% /media
5. Check the "System Volume Information" folder, which usually exists on the formatted partition of any USB drive.
herong$ ls -l "/media/System Volume Information" total 256 -rwxrwxrwx 1 herong staff 76 Apr 2 20:43 IndexerVolumeGuid -rwxrwxrwx 1 herong staff 12 Apr 2 20:43 WPSettings.dat
6. Remember to umount the USB file system before taking the USB drive out of the USB socket to avoid any data damage.
herong$ sudo umount /dev/sdb1 (or) herong$ sudo umount /media
Now I am ready to use /media to copy files from and to the USB drive.
Table of Contents
Cockpit - Web Portal for Administrator
"df" - Display Free Space of File System
►Mount USB Drive as File System
"fdisk" - Format Disk Partitions
"dd" - Copy Data from/to Storage Devices
Use "dd" Command to Test I/O Speed
"hdparm" - Hard Disk Parameters
"du" - Display Disk Usage of Directories
Mount Windows NTFS File System
Access Persmissions on "ntfs-3g" File System
File System Types, IDs and Formats
"parted" - Partition Manipulation Program
Reformat NTFS Partition into EXT4 Partition
Unreachable Remote File Systems
SELinux - Security-Enhanced Linux
Software Package Manager on CentOS - DNF and YUM
Running Apache Web Server (httpd) on Linux Systems
Running PHP Scripts on Linux Systems
Running MySQL Database Server on Linux Systems
Running Python Scripts on Linux Systems
vsftpd - Very Secure FTP Daemon
Postfix - Mail Transport Agent (MTA)
Dovecot - IMAP and POP3 Server
Email Client Tools - Mail User Agents (MUA)