Comments on: Find USB flash drive device in Linux

By: John

John — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:31:18 +0000

useful article. i have a fileserver with no desktop and this helped me identify a couple of dead usb connections. eventually found a live one at the rear of the server. much quicker than moving big files across the network. thanks

By: Hxx

Hxx — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:01:31 +0000

I use the command
fdisk -l (small L)
Shows all storage devices.

By: Toly

Toly — Mon, 11 May 2009 22:27:56 +0000

@David,

Can you inject your usb drive, run “dmesg”, and post 10-20 lines where it identifies your drive? This might help to resolve your problem.

Thank you,
– Toly

By: David J. Heinrich

David J. Heinrich — Fri, 08 May 2009 04:45:58 +0000

I have one that says sdb:sdb1 when I plug it in; but i have no /dev/sdb1 device:

# mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /media/”USB Drive”
mount: special device /dev/sdb1 does not exist

Navigating to /dev and using MAKEDEV doesn’t help:

# cd /dev
# sudo ./MAKEDEV sdb1
.udevdb or .udev presence implies active udev. Aborting MAKEDEV invocation.

What do I do?

By: Esteban

Esteban — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 20:46:40 +0000

You’re right Toly! …even when Ubuntu can sometimes do it “automatically” I prefer the manual way, that’s why I liked your tip… very useful tip indeed! Thanks so much!

By: Brian

Brian — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 18:45:37 +0000

Great series of posts, this saved several flash drives I had inadvertently screwed up. Thanks much!

By: Toly

Toly — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 02:25:21 +0000

@Esteban,

Ubuntu does it “automatically” most of the time. However there are times (mostly hardware related) where Ubuntu can’t/don’t mount the USB drive.

– Toly

By: Esteban

Esteban — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 02:24:10 +0000

Useful tip! Ubuntu can do that automatically, but I love the complicated way… Thanks!

By: Clair

Clair — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 11:07:56 +0000

Thanks for the update. This is helpful

By: Toly

Toly — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 06:16:55 +0000

@Matt,

Although it seems to me to be a bit easier for non “sysadmin” people to check the syslog – thanks for the tip.

– Toly