I looked for a simple solution for (preferably) mount USB Arch Linux (pen drives, external hard drives, etc.). Gnome and other desktop environments do it for you but if you keep things simple with a small window manager (like Awesome or wmfs) you need to set it up by yourself.

How to Unmount and Mount USB on Arch Linux

As it may happen sometimes you either work inside a terminal client or you find yourself using a Linux system or a file manager which does not automatically mount volumes (meaning, for example, USB sticks or external hard drives). The next solution will help you to Mount USB Arch Linux.

Mounting devices

Determine device node of the USB drive by matching it with the label of the disk. Go to the directory “/ dev / disk / by – label”. Enter the command “ls” and press enter to get a list of all currently connected devices. If the drive has no label, do the same in “/ dev/disk / by-id”. Find the device node pad that fits your drive.

Create the folder where you mount the drive. Linux has a path that will refer to the contents of the disk. These are usually placed in “/ mnt /”, but you can create the folder wherever you want. For example, create a folder named “USB drive” under “/ mnt” by the following command:

#mkdir usb

Note: you can choose any folder name you want.

Once you created the USB folder it is time to mount our device on it. The following command must be typed as a root user or putting sudo in front of the command if your system uses it:

#mount /dev/sdb1 usb

After this, your volume should be mounted. However, do keep in mind that you might need to give a more detailed path description than our examples USB. A more detailed path description will be needed if you move out from the parent directory which has a folder called USB in it.

Unmounting devices

Once you are done with your USB device. If you wish to unmount become a root user or use sudo while typing the following command inside the terminal client:

#umount usb

If you liked this article, please read other articles related to Arch Linux such as installing Yaourt to install packages on Arch Linux or installing java jdk on Arch Linux. Thank you for reading our articles!