RH 9 & USB Pen Drive?

[Rick Stevens]

On Wed, 2005-10-26 at 03:56 -0700, gerrynix wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> How to mount a USB pen drive?  What is the device names and 
> example syntax. How are they mounted automagically at insertion?

The automounter on RH9 is not particularly wonderful.  It's much better
under FCx.

Anyway, the drive will appear as a SCSI device.  If it's the only SCSI
device you have, it'll show up as "/dev/sda".  If you have other SCSI
devices, it'll show up as the next alphabetically-sequential letter that
is unused (if you have a SCSI disk AND the pen drive, the pen will show
up as /dev/sdb and so on).

You'll need to know what partitions it has on it, so plug it in and do
"fdisk -l /dev/sda" to get a list of its partitions.  Let's assume it
has a single partition, partition 1.  You need to create a mountpoint
for it, so do something like (as root):

	# mkdir /mnt/flash

Then, to mount it:

	# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/flash

The drive will now appear on the filesystem as /mnt/flash and you can
do with it what you will.  When you're done, don't forget to unmount it.
There are several commands to do that...any of them will get the job
done:

	# umount /mnt/flash
	# umount /dev/sda1
	# eject /mnt/flash
	# eject /dev/sda1

As I said, RH9's automounter for hot-pluggable stuff (USB, firewire,
etc.) leaves much to be desired.  I'd recommend that you upgrade to one
of the Fedora Core releases, as RH9 is long dead (well, two years
dead).  FC4 works quite well and is the latest free Red Hat-related
release.  Note that FC4 is based on the 2.6 kernel and Xorg's X stuff
instead of RH9's 2.4 kernel and XFree86 X implementation.

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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
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