How to configure your USB flash drive

[catch]

this would be just a short (and i mean, short) how-to discussion on installing your USB flash drives, in regardless of the capacity, on your linux box.

on the console...

log-in as root

$ su -
Password:

make a mounting directory for the flash drive

root # mkdir /mnt/flash

mounting the flash drive to your linux system

root # mount -a -t msdos /dev/sda1 /mnt/flash

or

root # mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/flash

whichever works best for you ;-)

you may notice, that mounting a pre-formatted flash drive from a windows system may not support long file names...

and unmounting the flash drive from your linux system, simply type...

root # umount /mnt/flash

if you have any problems during the process or comments, just drop me a post.

cheers!

[vern]

Great tutorial. I wonder if this might work on an external USB HD. I have one coming next week and I want to be able to use it in Linux.

[idlewild]

you can also use hotplug to auto-mount your external devices. for this to work, you need to enable udev support in your kernel. you can additionally install the coldplug init script to mount your devices during startup

[catch]

i tried this on a borrowed digital camera and it worked! it looked like the camera was just 'another' USB flash drive.

@vern: as far as i view it, all USB storage devices can be mounted with these procedures. let me know if you have done it.

[BadDudes]

the best way to do it is after you have insert the usb drive ...use "dmesg" command from there you will see what device does your usb belongs .. we were able to mount usb hd properly

[vern]

The Ubuntu Linux installation saw and mounted the drive as read-only. I'll have to figure out how to write to it. It is formatted as NTFS though, so that might be a problem. My biggest problem is getting wireless networking to work.

Pic here:

http://ribbed.us/2005/10/03/300-gigs...ernal-storage/

[BadDudes]

have you tried to format it using fat32? ..... is fat32 can support up to 300gigs ?????

[vern]

FAT32 supports up to 2TB, but I don't want FAT32. I'll look around some more.