cannot find usb flash drive in Ubuntu

Question

I tried a little searching first before I came to ask in here. And I found this code, but I don't understand it.

sudo mkdir /mnt/usbdrv
sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/usbdrv

What is vfat?What is sda1 and what is -t? How do I type this in order to be compatible with my flash drive?

Answer 1

-t basically tells the mount command what filing system the device uses - vfat is the filing system it will use.

What that command is basically doing is creating a new empty folder, then mounting the USB sticks filing system to in - however, it makes alot of assumptions, the main one being that /dev/sda1 is your usb stick.

Ubuntu should automatically mount your USB stick into a usable "drive" visible from Computer. If it isn't, I recommend you go to Terminal and type lsusb which should tell you if the computer has detected your USB stick.

If it hasn't, it is possible that the drive is either damaged or not properly connected. If it has found it, I will step aside so someone with more *nix experience can help you!

Answer 2

Your usb flash drive should mount automatically. It is usually mounted in /media/XXXX directory, where XXX is the label of your flash drive.

The code that you found describes how to mount flash drive manually. You must replace sda1 with the proper device name for your flash drive. One of the ways to find this name is to run the following command in the console:

sudo tail -f /var/log/messages

and then putting your flash drive in.

You will see a bunch of messages about the drive being found. There will be info about device name in one of the messages - it will be something like: sdb1, sdc2, sdd4 or similar.

If you want to learn more about parameters of mount command, run "man mount" in the console

Answer 3

i saw this kind of problem and i change the format of flashdrive ntfs to fat or fat32 and this solve the problem i hope it works ;)

Answer 4

If you do not see anything on your desktop, this may be because your drive is not recognized by Linux. Either the partitions are unformatted/non-existent, or that the file system on the storage device is unknow.

Immediately after having connected the device, get to a shell, and enter the command lsusb. This should list you the detected USB devices. You should see yours. It could be recognized by its brand name for example.

Also, the dmesg command should tell you about recent hardware detection.

Finally, run GParted, from the system menu. If you do not have it, get installed using Synaptics. GParted will scan for all devices it can detect, and will list them. You should recognize it by its size. Note that the numbers may be a little bit off, as there may be a difference between 1GB = 2^30 and 1GB = 10^9.

JF