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.

  1. Become root.

    $ sudo -s


  2. Plug in USB drive to a USB port.

  3. 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)

  4. 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:

  1. 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.

  2. Unplug USB drive.