USB not detected/mounted by Live DesktopBSD DVD

[daacosta]

Greetings,

I have downloaded and used the live DesktopBSD but I don´t know how to mount a USB pendrive. Can somebody tell me how to do that? I have tried using the GUI for this but the USB pendrive is not detected.

Thanks!

[mdnayeem]

what you see when you run
lsusb
if you can see your usb device then mounting is easy
do:
mkdir /mount/usb
mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb

replace sda1 with your actual parititon name on which you want to mount.

[anomie]

Post the results of dmesg | grep 'da[0-9]'

What we're looking for is a device like da0, da1, etc. associated with your usb drive.

Assuming the device is da0, you'd most likely mount it this way (as root):
# mount -t msdosfs /dev/da0s1 /mnt/usb-drive

Of course you can mount it to a different directory if /mnt/usb-drive does not exist (or you can create it).

Type msdosfs is used because almost all usb drives are formatted with fat32 (or other MS compatible filesystems). The device da0s1 is used because FreeBSD normally recognizes usb drives' first slice.

You can mount as a normal user too, but some additional steps are needed (changing a sysctl MIB) and that's probably not useful on a live cd.

[anomie]

P.S. Remember to umount the drive when finished (and before pulling it out).

# umount /dev/da0s1

[daacosta]

Thank you very much for your help:

desktopbsd# dmesg | grep 'da[0-9]'
da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
da0: <Imation Nano PMAP> Removable Direct Access SCSI-0 device
da0: 40.000MB/s transfers
da0: 3935MB (8058880 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 501C)
GEOM_LABEL: Label for provider da0s1 is msdosfs/Nano.
desktopbsd#

So DesktopBSD sees the USB drive. Mounting it wasn't difficult either but I am not sure whether the directory I chose was fine or not /root/DesktopBSD

Post the results of dmesg | grep 'da[0-9]'

What we're looking for is a device like da0, da1, etc. associated with your usb drive.

Assuming the device is da0, you'd most likely mount it this way (as root):
# mount -t msdosfs /dev/da0s1 /mnt/usb-drive

Of course you can mount it to a different directory if /mnt/usb-drive does not exist (or you can create it).

Type msdosfs is used because almost all usb drives are formatted with fat32 (or other MS compatible filesystems). The device da0s1 is used because FreeBSD normally recognizes usb drives' first slice.

You can mount as a normal user too, but some additional steps are needed (changing a sysctl MIB) and that's probably not useful on a live cd.

[anomie]

... I am not sure whether the directory I chose was fine or not /root/DesktopBSD

"Traditionally" you mount external drives to a /mnt subdirectory. But what you chose is just fine. (In this case it really does not matter *.)

* Caveat: Bear in mind that the directory you mount a filesystem to will become temporarily overlaid. This is non-destructive, and the old contents will be back once you umount said filesystem.