Mounting a USB HDD on Ubuntu server

I’m running up my latest Raspberry Pi with a connected USB SSD and forgot how to mount the thing. So this post is a little reminder. Ofcourse the instruction are not exclusive to Raspberry Pi’s or Ubuntu, but hey I just wanted a back story to this post.

So you’ve connected your USB drive and you’ve got a SSH terminal (i.e. via PuTTY) session connected to you Ubuntu server, what’s next?

Where’s my drive

The first thing you need to figure out is where your drive is, i.e. what /dev/ location it’s assigned to.

  • Try running df, which reports disk space and usage, from this you might be able to spot your drive, in my case it’s /dev/sda1 and its obvious by the size of the drive
  • If this is not conclusive then run sudo fdisk -l this may help locate the disk

Mounting the drive

Assuming we’ve located the device, and for this example it is on /dev/sda1, how do we mount this drive?

  • Create a folder that will get mapped to our mounted drive, for example mkdir /media/external or whatever you want to name it
  • To mount the drive we now use 
    sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /media/external

    Obviously this drive I’m mounting is an NTFS formatted drive, you might be using vfat or something else instead, so check. Then we simply have the source (/dev/sda1) mapping to the destination (/media/external) that we created.

    Note: without the mount taking place, ls the destination and you’ll see no files (if they exist on your drive). After you mount the drive. ls the destination to see the files on the USB drive.

As it currently stands, when you reboot you’ll have to mount the drive again.

Auto-mounting the drive

In scenarios where we’re not removing the drive and simply want the OS to automount our drive, we need to do a couple of things.

  • Find the UUID for the drive by running sudo blkid, next to the device, i.e. /dev/sda1 should be a UUID, copy or note down the string.
  • Run sudo nano fstab
  • Add a new line to the bottom of the file along these lines 
    UUID=ABCDEFGHIJK /media/external auto nosiud,nodev,nofail 0 0

    and save the file

  • Run sudo mount -a to check for errors

Now when you reboot the machine the USB drive should be mounted automatically.