Mounting Storage Devices in Linux

Storage devices are mounted using the mount utility. It is usually used together with arguments.

Mounting Using Mount

Mounting storage devices using the Mount utility is quite straightforward. You just need to enter a command specifying the partition to be mounted as an argument, and the directory where this partition should be mounted.

We can get a list of all existing partitions as follows:

fdisk -l

For example, let’s mount the nvme1n1p3 partition to the /mnt directory:

sudo mount /dev/nvme1n1p3 /mnt/

To unmount it, use the following command:

sudo umount /mnt

You can view a list of all mounted devices in a simple way:

mount

Mounting Using UUID

To obtain information about the UUID of the partitions on our server, run the following command:

sudo blkid

You will see an output similar to this:

Next, open the configuration file that contains information about all partitions mounted at system startup:

sudo nano /etc/fstab

After that, depending on the filesystem, you should add a line with the appropriate parameters to this config.

For example, if we need to mount an NTFS partition, we should use the following line:

UUID="0x0x0x0x0" /mnt/myfolder rw,nls=utf8,gid=plugdev,umask=0002 0 0

For FAT and FAT32 filesystems, use the following line:

UUID="0x0x0x0x0" /mnt/myflash vfat rw,exec,codepage=866,nls=utf8,gid=plugdev,umask=0002,nofail,users 0 0

To apply the changes you’ve made (mount the devices), run the command:

sudo mount -a

Summary

That’s it! We’ve learned how to mount storage devices manually. This article is relevant for most Linux distributions.