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.

Become root.

$ sudo -s


Plug in USB drive to a USB port.

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)

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:

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.

Unplug USB drive.

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