How to mount USB Pendrive - Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Question

I have just installed Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on a new ssd (no Windows operating system installed). Everything looks fine except that I cannot see a USB pendrive when I attach it to the usb port. How do I fix this?

Answer 1

First check if the usb is detected at all. Let's give you an example...

Without connecting the USB pendrive:

user@ubuntu:~$ lsblk
NAME      MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
mtdblock0  31:0    0    16M  0 disk 
mtdblock1  31:1    0   7.5G  0 disk /

Now with the pendrive connected:

user@ubuntu:~$ lsblk
NAME      MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
mtdblock0  31:0    0    16M  0 disk 
mtdblock1  31:1    0   7.5G  0 disk /
sda         8:16   1  63.2M  0 disk 
`-sda1      8:17   1  63.1M  0 part 

As you can see the pendrive is detected and assigned as /dev/sda containing one partition as /dev/sda1. Now it's time to check the filesystem type of this partition:

 user@ubuntu:~$ sudo fdisk /dev/sda -l

Disk /dev/sda: 66 MB, 66240000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 8 cylinders, total 129375 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x6439f37f

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *          63      129338       64638   af  HFS / HFS+

This specific USB pendrive has a Mac Os Extended (journaled) partition. In this case to be able to mount this partition for further read/write operations in Ubuntu you will need to install according filesystem support for that:

sudo apt-get install hfsprogs

For exFat:

sudo apt-get install exfat-fuse exfat-utils

and so on...