[PLUG] Mounting Thumb Drive

[John Jason Jordan]

The 512 MB Cruzer thumb drive I bought on eBay arrove.

Now I need to mount it. I created a mount point as /media/thumbdrive. But I can't figure out what Linux is calling the drive. I did dmesg | tail and it seems to be /dev/sda -- at least it identifies something there as /dev/sda and having 512 MB. If I go to File > Open in any application it shows up as SanDisk Cruzer Micro.

I'm assuming it's formatted vfat, since I bought it from someone using Windows. And if it's not, that's what I need on it, because the purpose is to be able to transfer files to non-linux computers. I double-checked it by plugging it into my Windows 2000 desktop, and in My Computer it is seen as 512 MB, formatted Fat32. For kicks I dragged a small .txt file and copied it onto the thumb drive. Windows seemed to have no problem doing so, and the file now shows up on the drive in Windows Explorer.

Moving it back to the Linux computer, I tried sudo mount /dev/sda /media/thumbdrive and it said it wanted the filesystem type. So I read the man page and it seems I should insert "vfat" in between the dev and the mount point. But that doesn't work either -- all I get is the help messages with indication which feature I did wrong.

I also opened Krusader with sudo and tried to use its mount-man feature, but it can't see /dev/sda. Evidently mount-man can only mount stuff that is in fstab, and this is not in there because I'm not sure what to call it. There's already a /dev/sda in there, and it refers to my 60 GB pocket disk, which is not currently connected. I don't want to mess that up. I can't find any instructions on how to edit fstab.

At the moment the thumb drive is in a USB port on the Linux computer and all happily lit up emitting an eerie blue light. If I try to open the file I put on there (e.g., with gedit) I get the error message "Unable to mount the selected volume.:Error: given UDI is not a mountable volume."

I bet I'm just missing some little key point. :(