Howto: Mount a USB device in SuSE Linux

by admin on August 11, 2008

I have a Kingston USB flash drive that does not automatically mount itself on my SLES server on occasion.  TID 7000951 explains how to mount the drive manually:

1) From a terminal, run:

lsmod |grep usb  make sure usb_storage is loaded.  If it is not, run:

modprobe usb-storage

2) Plug the USB device in and run dmesg.  The results will look like:

USB Mass Storage support registered.
scsi 6:0:0:0: Direct-Access CRUCIAL USB Flash Disk 2.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
ready
sd 6:0:0:0: [sdd] 1017856 512-byte hardware sectors (521 MB)
sd 6:0:0:0: [sdd] Write Protect is off
sd 6:0:0:0: [sdd] Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
sd 6:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through
sd 6:0:0:0: [sdd] 1017856 512-byte hardware sectors (521 MB)
sd 6:0:0:0: [sdd] Write Protect is off
sd 6:0:0:0: [sdd] Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
sd 6:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through
sdd: sdd1 <– THIS IS THE DEVICE NAME
sd 6:0:0:0: [sdd] Attached SCSI removable disk
sd 6:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg4 type 0
usb-storage: device scan complete

Look for the kernel device name, in this case, /dev/sdd, with a partition on /dev/sdd1

3) Mount volume manually by running:

mount /dev/sdd1 /mnt

Access the USB drive at /mnt

To unmount the USB drive run:

umount /mnt

{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }

Leroy Glinchy August 12, 2008 at 2:25 pm

You can also put the lines into /etc/fstab:

/dev/sda1 /mnt/usb auto noauto,user,rw 0 0

Then you can do:

mount /usb

instead of the long line like above.

You can get rid of the modprobe line by doing this:

Edit /etc/sysconfig/kernel and make sure

INITRD_MODULES=”usb-storage OTHER MODULES”

Note, OTHER MODULES means that there are going to be other modules, you don’t ever actually type OTHER MODULES there.

Reply

Gordon Hilliard November 20, 2008 at 11:06 am

Hi Julie,

thanks for that, don’t you just love Linux? Someone has usually solved the problem for you.

Best Regards

Gordon

Reply

xrayspex April 28, 2009 at 9:03 am

well, i hate to be a bitch but problems like mounting a flash drive simply do not appear in Windows. otherwise i agree with gordon. i love linux, but certainly not for the way it handles my usb key.

Reply

J Rifkin December 11, 2009 at 12:52 pm

This didn’t quite work for me. My /var/log/messages file gave

/dev/sds

as the address, then when I tried to mount it I got the following error,

> mount /dev/sds1 /mnt
mount: /dev/sds1 already mounted or /mnt busy

It turns out that the partition was really mounted on /dev/dm-14. I learned that I unplugged the drive (without having mounted it), and found the following two lines in my /var/log/messages file

…. multipathd: dm-14: remove map (uevent)
…. multipathd: dm-13: remove map (uevent)

When I re-connected the USB drive, I was able to mount it with

> mount /dev/dm-14 /mnt

Reply

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