How to mount a USB flash drive

The other day I wanted to transfer some files to a USB flash drive on my Ubuntu 9.10 deskktop and noticed the USB drive did not automount.

Manually mounting a USB drive is achieved with a few simple steps in a terminal window:

First we need to know what the name of the file system is. With the device plugged in we use the fdisk command.

scott@blackjack:~$ sudo fdisk -l
[sudo] password for scott:

Disk /dev/sda: 400.1 GB, 400088457216 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 48641 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x6669894e

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1       47888   384660328+  83  Linux
/dev/sda2           47889       48641     6048472+   5  Extended
/dev/sda5           47889       48641     6048441   82  Linux swap / Solaris
Note: sector size is 2048 (not 512)

Disk /dev/sdb: 1016 MB, 1016858624 bytes
16 heads, 32 sectors/track, 969 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 512 * 2048 = 1048576 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *           1         969      992182    6  FAT16
scott@blackjack:~$

The device is called sdb1, and it is this that we will mount. The sequence of commands to mount and then unmount are:

scott@blackjack:~$ cd /media
scott@blackjack:/media$ sudo mkdir thing
scott@blackjack:/media$ sudo mount /dev/sdb1 thing
scott@blackjack:/media$ sudo umount thing
scott@blackjack:/media$ sudo rmdir thing
scott@blackjack:/media$