Linux USB Hard Drives

If you have a digital camera, an mp3 player, or a usb pen drive then you’ll want to access your data while you’re running Linux. For iPod users I’ve already posted some information on getting your iPod working under Linux, but for the rest of us there’s some pretty basic stuff we can do to make sure that our usb drives work and play well with our computers.

If you’ve tried to use a usb drive in Windows XP you’ll probably have noticed that all you need to do is plug it in and it appears in My Computer the same way that a hard drive appears. This is because most modern usb drives use USB Mass Storage protocol that makes them interact with computers as usb hard drives. If you’re using a modern version of KDE or Gnome then you shouldn’t have to worry about this too much because there’s a good chance that upon plugging in your usb device it will be automatically mounted and an icon will appear on your desktop.

If that doesn’t happen for you either because you’re not using new versions of those desktop environments or because, like me, you fiddle with things too much and that particular feature has long been broken then you can mount this drive yourself.

accessing usb drives under Linux
plug in the drive
if you don’t have the folder “/mnt/usb” then go ahead and make it
mkdir /mnt/usb
and then mount the usb device
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb
now make a link to the device on your desktop
ln -s /mnt/usb /home/[username]/Desktop/usb_drive

Then you can access this usb drive just like a hard drive partition. Enjoy!