In Linux, any disk drive has to be mounted first before you can use it. That actually is true for Windows also. But Windows shields a lot of that away from a regular user. Unlike Windows, there is no A: or D: drives for you to go directly in Linux, although I’ve heard that some versions of gnome or kde can do similar things.

With the popularity of USB flash drives, I thought it would be helpful to show how you can mount a USB flash drive on Linux command line to a lot of Windows users who are transitioning to Linux, or need to use Windows occasionally. My way may not be the best way but it has worked for me on my Linux machine. Let’s get to it:

0. Plug in the flash drive;
1. su as root, if you are not root already;
2. mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
3. cd /mnt to access the USB drive;
4. umount /dev/sda1 when you are done.