How to Mount a USB Drive on Linux

Need to mount a USB drive on Linux?

First, plug the drive in. Use sudo fdisk -l to view disks attached to the system. Look for an entry corresponding to the disk you’ve just inserted:

Disk /dev/sda: 119.5 GiB, 128320801792 bytes, 250626566 sectors
Disk model: Flash Drive FIT
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 4FD2D271-36AF-B847-916F-03EABE1BF0CF

Device     Start       End   Sectors   Size Type
/dev/sda1   2048 250626532 250624485 119.5G Linux filesystem

We want the Device here, which is /dev/sda1.

Next, we must prepare a mount point for the disk. Let’s assume this disk will be known as /mnt/usb-drive:

sudo mkdir /mnt/usb-drive

Now we are ready to mount the drive:

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb-drive

Try accessing the drive:

cd /mnt/usb-drive
ls

Yay! Can we write?

cd /mnt/usb-drive
touch asdf
touch: cannot touch '/mnt/usb-drive/asdf': Permission denied

Oh no! This is happening because the mount directory is owned by root. Change it to your current user with:

sudo chown $USER:$USER /mnt/usb-drive

Let’s try again:

cd /mnt/usb-drive
touch asdf
ls asdf

Yay!