Highlight

2014-08-26

How to manually mount a USB storage device in GNU/Linux

After creating a bootable (possibly smaller than 16 GB for BIOS compatibility) USB stick, using Universal USB Installer or equivalent, you may find that some distros, like System Rescue CD do not automount your other/larger USB storage devices.

To solve that, run these commands from your terminal:
mkdir stick
fdisk -l
mount /dev/sdc1 stick
That will:

1. create a mountpoint
2. allow you to find the device that matches your storage size, e.g. /dev/sdc
3. mount the 1st partition of that device on your mountpoint

Before removing the device you may want to unmount it, lest OSs like Windows complain on insert:
umount stick
You can possibly save keystrokes by pressing the up arrow key a few times so you only have to prepend a "u" to the mount command in your command history:
umount /dev/sdc1 stick