USB Flash Storage Devices

As the price of flash media goes down, their popularity goes up. They are used in digital camera's, mp3 players, as hard drives, and in ways I haven't thought of.

One of the more popular ways to use this media on your computer, is by plugging it into your USB port. The USB thumb drives (sometimes called pocket drives, or pen drives) are the most obvious product that do this, but most digital camera's and mp3 players work this way

This How-To was written to help people use these drives on thier linux machines. Since Linux treats flash media as a hard drive, and hard drives are very well understood, the steps are quite simple.

Fermi Linux 7.3.x and 9.0.x

1. As root start a tail of our var log messages.

       tail -f /var/log/messages

2. Plug in your usb device
3. Look at your output from the first part, and find out what the device was named.  It should look like something like /dev/sda1.
4. Make a directory to mount to.  I'll call mine/mnt/removable

       mkdir /mnt/removable

5. Edit your fstab to put the entry in it. Be sure to put user and noauto in the settings section. This allows regular users to mount it and it doesn't automatically get mounted at startup.

       /dev/sda1   /mnt/removable   auto   user,noauto   0 0

    mount /mnt/removable