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Mount/USB - Community Help Wiki

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Mount/USB
Introduction
This page explains how to use USB drives, like external
hard disks and USB flash drives (aka USB sticks, thumb
drives, pen drives, etc). The material here also applies to
flash cards (like in your digital camera).
USB storage devices have the enormous advantage that for
the most part they use a standard set of protocols. Thus,
instead of needing individual drivers, as does much
computer hardware, a standard driver permits access to the
devices, making them very portable and able to easily work
on many platforms.
For help with internal hard drives, see Fstab and
MountingWindowsPartitions.

Automounting
Mounting

Contents
1. Introduction
2. Automounting
1. Mounting
2. Configuring Automounting
3. Configuring Program
Autostart
4. Auto-mounting (Ubuntu
Server)
3. Manually Mounting
1. Using Disks
2. Using mount
3. Using pmount
4. The Importance of Unmounting
5. Other Useful Commands
6. Troubleshooting
1. Interfering services
2. Unclean LogFile
3. User Privileges
4. Preferences
5. USB 2 Issues
6. Buffer I/O Errors
7. Device suddenly becomes
read-only
8. USB-Device is or becomes
read-only without errors
9. General tip
10. Seeking Further Help
7. Other Resources

By default, storage devices that are plugged into the system


mount automatically in the /media/<username> directory,
open a file browser window for each volume and place an
icon on your desktop. The rationale for this slight change of
behavior can be found here. If you plug in a usb hard disk with many partitions, all of the partitions will
automatically mount. This behaviour may not be what you want; you can configure it as shown below.

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If the volumes have labels the icons will be named accordingly. Otherwise, they will be named "disk",
"disk-1" and so on.
To change the volume label see RenameUSBDrive.

Configuring Automounting
To enable or disable automount open a terminal and type:
dconf-editor

Browse to org.gnome.desktop.media-handling.
The automount key controls whether to automatically mount media. If set to true, Nautilus will
automatically mount media such as user-visible hard disks and removable media on start-up and media
insertion.
Another key, org.gnome.desktop.media-handling.automount-open, controls whether to automatically
open a folder for automounted media.
If set to true, Nautilus will automatically open a folder when media is automounted. This only applies to
media where no known x-content type was detected; for media where a known x-content type is
detected, the user configurable action will be taken instead. This can be configured as shown below.

Configuring Program Autostart


To control which programs automatically start when you plug in a device, go to System-Settings Details - Removable Media.
For more complex scenarios, see UsbDriveDoSomethingHowto.

Unmounting/Ejecting
Before you disconnect the device, don't forget to unmount it. This can be done in one of the following
ways:
Right-click the desktop icon and select "Unmount" (or in some cases, "Eject").
In the file manager window, click on the "eject" button next to the name of the mounted volume.
Right-click the icon in the launcher and select "Unmount".

Auto-mounting (Ubuntu Server)


By default, disk drives do not auto-mount in Ubuntu Server Edition. If you are looking for a lightweight
solution that does not depend on HAL/DBUS, you can install "usbmount".

Manually Mounting
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Using Disks
Disks (the GNOME disk utility) is an application for visually managing disk drives and media. When
you run it, you will see a list of your drives, including USB drives. If you click a drive on the list, you
can view its details, and you can click the triangle-shaped button (Play button) to mount the drive. (This
method works even when the drive does not auto-mount.)

Using mount
Get the Information
Sometimes, devices don't automount, in which case you should try to manually mount them. First, you
must know what device you are dealing with and what filesystem it is formatted with. Most flash drives
are FAT16 or FAT32 and most external hard disks are NTFS. Type the following:
sudo fdisk -l

Find your device in the list. It is probably something like /dev/sdb1. For more information about
filesystems, see LinuxFilesystemsExplained.

Create the Mount Point


Now we need to create a mount point for the device. Let's say we want to call it "external". You can call
it whatever you want, but if you use spaces in the name it gets a little more complicated. Instead, use an
underscore to separate words (like "my_external"). Create the mount point:
sudo mkdir /media/external

Mount the Drive


We can now mount the drive. Let's say the device is /dev/sdb1, the filesystem is FAT16 or FAT32 (like
it is for most USB flash drives), and we want to mount it at /media/external (having already created the
mount point):
sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /media/external -o uid=1000,gid=1000,utf8,dmask=027,fmask=137

The options following the "-o" give you ownership of the drive, and the masks allow for extra security
for file system permissions. If you don't use those extra options you may not be able to read and write
the drive with your regular username.
Otherwise, if the device is formatted with NTFS, run:
sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /media/external

Note: You must have the ntfs-3g driver installed. See MountingWindowsPartitions for more
information.

Unmounting the Drive


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When you are finished with the device, don't forget to unmount the drive before disconnecting it.
Assuming /dev/sdb1 is mounted at /media/external, you can either unmount using the device or the
mount point:
sudo umount /dev/sdb1

or:
sudo umount /media/external

You cannot unmount from the desktop by right-clicking the icon if the drive was manually mounted.

Using pmount
There is a program called pmount available in the repositories which allows unprivileged users to
mount drives as if they were using sudo, even without an entry in /etc/fstab. This is perfect for
computers that have users without RootSudo access, like public terminals or thin clients.
pmount can be used with the same syntax as mount (but without sudo), or quite simply as follows:
pmount <device> [ label ]

Example:
pmount /dev/sdb1 flash_drive

This will mount the device /dev/sdb1 at /media/flash_drive.


If you leave off the label option, it will mount by default at /media/device.
To unmount the device, use pumount, like so:
pumount <device>

Example:
pumount /dev/sdb1

For more help, see the man pages for pmount and pumount.

The Importance of Unmounting


Before disconnecting devices, you must unmount them first. This is similar to "Safely
Remove" in Windows in that the device won't unmount until data is finished being written to
the device, or until other programs are finished using it. This applies to all types of storage
devices, including flash drives, flash cards, external hard drives, ipods and other media players,
and even remote storage like Samba or NFS shares.
Failure to unmount before disconnecting the device can result in loss of data and/or a corrupted
file system. There are no exceptions to this rule. Be safe - unmount your drives before disconnecting
them!

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Other Useful Commands


To see a list of your USB devices (the vendor and device ID's), run:
lsusb

To see all attached storage devices and their partitions, run:


sudo fdisk -l

To see information about currently mounted systems, simply run:


mount

Troubleshooting
Presented here are some common problems users encounter.

Interfering services
Two services/programs responsible for automounting might interfere and thereby prevent a successful
automount and permission setting.
Example: Activating the Automount function of Nautilus while using pmount will result in read-only
permissions for normal users. Either disable Nautilus' Automount function or deinstall pmount.

Unclean LogFile
If you are mounting drives formatted with NTFS (like most external USB hard disks are), you must first
have the ntfs-3g driver installed. This is done automatically in newer versions of Ubuntu. You should
also install ntfs-config and enable mounting, which is not done automatically. For ntfs-3g and
ntfs-config, see MountingWindowsPartitions.
When a drive is not Safely Removed from a Windows machine (or a forced shutdown occurs from
Windows), you may get an error like this when you plug in your drive:
$LogFile indicates unclean shutdown (0, 0)
Failed to mount '/dev/sda1': Operation not supported
Mount is denied because NTFS is marked to be in use. Choose one action:
Choice 1: If you have Windows then disconnect the external devices by
clicking on the 'Safely Remove Hardware' icon in the Windows
taskbar then shutdown Windows cleanly.
Choice 2: If you don't have Windows then you can use the 'force' option for
your own responsibility. For example type on the command line:
mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /media/sda1/ -o force

The best option is Choice 1, but you can force the mount by running Choice 2 with sudo. You must then
manually unmount it from the terminal (you can't right click the desktop icon):

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sudo umount <mount_point>

After that the drive should automount normally again.

User Privileges
If your usb device doesn't appear on your desktop, you should check that your user has the correct
privileges. Go to System->Administration->User and Groups, choose the user, click on "Properties",
then go to the "User Privileges" tab. You should have the "Access external storage devices
automatically" option checked.

Preferences
If your usb device doesn't appear on your desktop, you should check that the automount action is
enabled in the preferences:
Navigate to System->Preferences->Removable Drives and Media
Verify that all "Mount removable drives when..." are checked.
NOTE: This does not seem to apply to Hardy Heron.

USB 2 Issues
old kernels workaround
If you encounter problems using your USB device with USB 2 (i.e. 'high speed' mode), you can revert to
the 'full speed' mode (slower) by unloading ehci_hcd. To do that, type in a terminal:
sudo rmmod ehci_hcd

before plugging in your device.

recent kernels workaround, from Karmic


see also AbsolutelyTech
ehci_hcd is now built into the kernel and cannot be load/unloaded using modprobe. To revert a
connected device from (failing) high-speed to full-speed:
Determine your device id using
lsusb

Find which bus it is connected to. The bus id can be found as a folder in /sys/bus/pci/drivers
/ehci_hcd. The following script explores buses and connected devices:
pushd /sys/bus/pci/drivers/ehci_hcd > /dev/null
for bus in 0000:??:??.? ; do
echo "ehci_hcd bus $bus"
pushd $bus/usb1 > /dev/null

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for dev in ?-?; do


idVendor=`cat $dev/idVendor`
idProduct=`cat $dev/idProduct`
echo "ehci_hcd bus $bus: device $dev = $idVendor:$idProduct"
done
popd > /dev/null
done
popd > /dev/null

The information is also usually available in /var/log/kern.log


Unbind the bus (and all devices) from the ehci_hcd driver. Insert the bus id in the following
command, using the format 0000:00:xx.x
sudo sh -c 'echo -n "0000:00:xx.x" > unbind'

Buffer I/O Errors


If you see errors related to Buffer I/O when attaching a USB storage device, there are two ways to work
around it. First, try using varying max_sectors settings, as such:
sudo sh -c "echo 120 > /sys/block/sda/queue/max_sectors_kb"

Try values of 120, 64 and 32.


If this does not resolve the issue, then you may need an unusual_dev entry for your device. It would
look something like this:
UNUSUAL_DEV(0x03eb , 0x2002, 0x0100, 0x9999,
"Generic",
"MusicDrive",
US_SC_DEVICE, US_PR_DEVICE, NULL,
US_FL_IGNORE_RESIDUE),

The vendor and device IDs can be obtained from the output of "lsusb". The entry would be placed in
drivers/usb/storage/unusual_devs.h. If you cannot compile your own kernel, please file a bug report, and
we'll attempt to compile a test module for you.

Device suddenly becomes read-only


If your device changes suddenly to read-only mode, and you see this kind of error:
[17183798.908000] FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sda1)
[17183798.908000]
fat_get_cluster: invalid cluster chain (i_pos 0)
[17183798.908000]
File system has been set read-only

This might be the sign of an unclean device. You should check your device. Try TestingStorageMedia
to do so. Or use "Disk Utility" (under System, Administration), find your device, unmount it, check the
file system, then mount it again.

USB-Device is or becomes read-only without errors


If you see "Write Protect is off" and no errors in your logfiles, than you should set filesystem type
specific mount options (FS_MOUNTOPTIONS) in /etc/usbmount/usbmount.conf. Wrong gid causes

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mounting read only.

General tip
When you encounter problems with USB devices, the first thing to do is to check the latest debug
information generated from the kernel just after you plug in your device and/or just after you encounter
the problem.
To do that, open a terminal and type :
dmesg

Check the latest messages; they should be related to your problem.

Seeking Further Help


The best place to get help with almost any Ubuntu problem is on the Ubuntu Forums. The Absolute
Beginner Talk section is best for beginners.

Other Resources
Some other related material:
RenameUSBDrive
BootFromUSB
UsbDriveDoSomethingHowto
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_flash_drive
DebuggingUSBStorage
CategoryHardware CategoryUsb
Mount/USB (last edited 2015-06-02 00:24:50 by jacob3 @ CPE503955526a2dCM503955526a2a.cpe.net.cable.rogers.com[99.235.168.12]:jacob3)

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