How to Manually Mount a Drive in Linux

If you are planning to add a second hard drive to your Linux system that was previously in a Windows system, and you want to save some of the information on the drive, then you will need to know how to manually mount it. Follow these easy steps and you will be up and running in no time.


Step 1 After physically installing the second hard drive as the slave on the Primary IDE, start your computer and open a Shell window.

Step 2 Now you will need to create a mount point. To do this you will need to use administrative privileges by using the “sudo” command. Try to create the new directory in the /media directory, to make things easier. The command you will use is: sudo mkdir /media/newdisk.

Step 3 Next you need to find what partition the disk is using. To do this you will use this command: sudo fdisk –l /dev/hdb. This command will show you the list of partitions on the hard drive you just installed. If this hard drive came from a Windows system, then the partition will either be FAT32 or NTFS.

Step 4 Depending on the partition type, you will now use the “mount” command to mount the disk. For FAT32 use: sudo mount –t vfat –o umask=ooo /dev/hdb1 /media/newdisk. For NTFS you will use: sudo mount –t ntfs –o umask=0222 /dev/hdb1 /media/newdisk.

Step 5 You should now be able to view the contents of the second hard drive. To do this, use the command: cd /mnt/newdisk.