Mounting and unmounting removable devices in linux

Mounting and unmounting removable devices in linux

Display the currently connected devices and available partitions:

fdisk -l

Example: A usb keyring will usually appear as /dev/sda. This device may be considered the 'root' of the device. Each partition is accessible by one of the sub-devices of /dev/sda. In this case /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2. The output from the fdisk command above shows the structure of the device tree.

godel:~# fdisk -l
/dev/sda
        #                    type name                length   base    ( size )  system
/dev/sda1     Apple_partition_map Apple                   63 @ 1       ( 31.5k)  Partition map
/dev/sda2              DOS_FAT_32 DOS_FAT_32_Untitled_2  507824 @ 64      (248.0M)  Unknown
/dev/sda3              Apple_Free                         16 @ 507888  (  8.0k)  Free space

Block size=512, Number of Blocks=507904
DeviceType=0x0, DeviceId=0x0

/dev/hda
        #                    type name                  length   base      ( size )  system
/dev/hda1     Apple_partition_map Apple                     63 @ 1         ( 31.5k)  Partition map
/dev/hda2         Apple_Bootstrap untitled                1954 @ 64        (977.0k)  NewWorld bootblock
/dev/hda3         Apple_UNIX_SVR2 untitled           232939454 @ 2018      (111.1G)  Linux native
/dev/hda4         Apple_UNIX_SVR2 swap                 1500176 @ 232941472 (732.5M)  Linux swap

Block size=512, Number of Blocks=234441648
DeviceType=0x0, DeviceId=0x0

As you can see we have two physical devices, /dev/hda and /dev/sda, representing the internal hard disk, and a USB pen drive. USB are considered to be SCSI devices and as such are named sdxx.

To mount the main filesystem of the USB drive, the filesystem named "DOS_FAT_32_Untitled_2", we need to refer to this partition. In this case /dev/sda2. So the command to mount FAT filesystem on the USB drive is:

mount -t vfat /dev/sda2 /mnt/keyring

This will of course be automated in the end.