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Mounting USB storage (on DICE SL7)

This page does not apply to Ubuntu

This page covers DICE SL7, not DICE Ubuntu. It should not be required for DICE Ubuntu, but if you need help, you can ask using the Computing support form.

DICE supports the mounting of external drives of most types, for FAT, NTFS and Linux Extended (ext2, etc) filesytems. For most users, mounting such storage is automatic as it is handled by GNOME's file manager and does not require root privileges.

For those who are not using GNOME, or need more advanced command-line control of the mounting process, we provide the pmount utility.

For example, to mount the newly-inserted USB drive detected in /dev/sde as "MYDRIVE":

 $ pmount /dev/sde1 MYDRIVE
 $ df -h /media/MYDRIVE/
 Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
 /dev/sde1             980M  156M  824M  16% /media/MYDRIVE

(you can find out the device name of the newly-inserted device by scanning the output of dmesg).

Remember that mounting a drive in this fashion means that you must umount it before removing or powering it off to avoid data loss:

 $ pumount /dev/sde1

See the manual page (man pmount) for more details, including advanced usage alongside nautilus or synchronous operation (to allow safe removal without unmounting).

Last reviewed: 
08/03/2023

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