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Hey everyone, I'm trying to mount my portable USB drive, which has been formatted in FAT32. When I try the command below, bash tells me that it doesn't recognize format ...
  1. #1
    Linux Engineer Javasnob's Avatar
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    Mounting a FAT32 filesystem

    Hey everyone, I'm trying to mount my portable USB drive, which has been formatted in FAT32. When I try the command below, bash tells me that it doesn't recognize format FAT32.

    mount -t fat32 /dev/usb/ /mnt/

    Is it possible to mount such a filesystem, and if so, how? I'd also like to know the method for NTFS as well please.

    Thank you very much!

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    Try vfat

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    Oh, and you'll probably need to add the umask=000 option to make sure you can read and write to the device. And you'll want to make an empty folder in /mnt/ because you have to mount in an empty folder, and /mnt/ is typically where those folders go, so you might want to use /mnt/usb/ after you've run mkdir /mnt/usb

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    Mounting NTFS is pretty much as you would expect. Note however that your kernel must have NTFS support. You could probably download and install some package from the web which will enable you to do so. Anyway, if you have one HD (hda) and have dual boot windows xp with some distro of Linux, then windows xp will probably be hda1 and Linux will be hda2. So mounting will look like this:

    Note you have to create the directory 'windows'

    Code:
    mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows
    There is no need (i don't think) to specify the '-t ntfs' if your kernel supports it. I've never done so anyway as far as I can remember.

    Also, are you sure you are mounting your usb drive correctly? Is it not suppose to be /dev/sda1?

    Code:
    mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usbdrive
    Hope that helps, if only a little :P

  5. #5
    Linux Engineer Javasnob's Avatar
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    I got support for the filesystems, but yes, /dev/usb/ seems to be the wrong one. I thought /dev/sda1/ was a SCSI harddrive though? Does anyone know what device corresponds to a portable USB drive?

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    /dev/sda1 is my USB drive designation...don't know why but that's what it is

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    I have 2 SATA harddrives, and they are /dev/sda and dev/sdb, and my usb is /dev/sdc, sorry I didn't catch that when I first responded. The sd disignation is for SCSI disks, and Linux recognizes SATA and USB storage as SCSI, maybe SCSI in Linux is for everything but IDE?

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