Victor’s Programming Aid

To mount a USB External Hard Drive to a Linux Box, first make sure the unit is plugged in and powered on. Depending on your linux distribution, the hard drive may automatically mount. If this is not the case, mounting the external hard drive is not a very complicated tasks.

To begin, you will need to know where the hard drive is located. In most cases, the location is /dev/sda1 (though this is not always the case). However, if this isn’t the case, you can run the df command into you console. This will return a list of devices where you will most likely be able to find your drive by means of the hard drive max capacity.

Now, assuming the external hard drive is found at /dev/sda1. A great default place to mount the drive is in the /mnt/usbdrive. You will first need to make sure the folder already exists. If the folder does not exist, it can be created by using the command mkdir ‘/mnt/usbdrive‘. Then, use the below command into your terminal:

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usbdrive ext3 default 0 0

In the above example, mount is the command, /dev/sda1 is where the hard drive is currently located and /mnt/usbdrive is the folder in which you want the mount the hard drive. The next ext3 is the hard drive file system (Click here for information on Linux File Systems). The next input ‘default’ tells the default settings to be used. The first zero means to back up the file system using the dump utility and the second zero tells the OS whether to process the hard drive if fsck is run.

To have the Linux distribution automatically mount the drive on boot, you will need to add an entry (line) to the /etc/fstab file. In this case, it will be exactly the same as the mount command, except you will not need the mount command:

/dev/sda1 /mnt/usbdrive ext3 default 0 0

Now you have your external that is mounted when the Linux operating system boots up.

Nowadays, most computers come built without a 3.5″ floppy drive. And 99% of the time, the floppy drive just is not required anymore. USB Flash drives, otherwise known as memory sticks or thumb drives, have made the floppy disk obsolete. Therefore, booting from a memory stick is the next step.To create a memory stick, you will need to first download and extract (unzip) two files: HP USB Disk Format Tool and Windows 98 System Files. Follow the steps below:

1. To create the bootable USB memory stick, install the HP USB Disk Format Tool.
2. Insert your USB memory stick into a the computer.
3. IMPORTANT: Backup files you wish to keep onto the local hard drive (as this process will delete all files on the memory stick).
4. Start up the installed application from the HP USB Disk Format Tool.
5. The device dropdown will automatically populate and identify your memory stick.
6. Select Fat32 from the Filesystem dropdown.
7. Check the box with “Create a DOS startup disk”.
8. In the following textbox, browse to the location of the extracted files from the Windows 98 Systesm Files.
9. Click the “Start” button.
10. Click “Yes” to the following dialog box warning you of file deletion.
11. Next, copy all extracted files from the Windows 98 System Files folder onto the USB memory stick to enable cd rom and mouse support.

Your USB memory stick is now bootable. If you wish to boot your computer from the USB key, be sure to set the proper settings in the BIOS.