[Bdi4emc-help] Mounting pen drives

Mon Dec 12 18:39:59 CET 2005

On Monday 12 December 2005 03:34, bdi4emc-help at lists.ourproject.org wrote:
> Hi group,
> I'm going to be using BDI-4 pretty soon as my mill is completed, with
> Jon Elson's UPC.  I have 4.30 running on the computer installed in the
> electronics cabinet right now.  The computer is somewhat buried in the
> cabinet so I was planning on using a USB flash drive to transfer files.
> I tried doing this today and I wasn't able to figure out how to mount
> it.  Is there a way to get it to auto-mount when I plug it in?
> Thanks,
> Michael

Hi Michael

Note: I do not have any USB pen drives to test this with, so much of the 
following is drawn from google searches and memories of setting up a USB ZIP 
drive.

Add the following two lines to /etc/modules

 usbcore
 usb-storage

(run "sudo modprobe usb-storage" to save having to reboot)

With the modules loaded, a mount point needs to be created. The prefered point 
is in /media, so run "sudo mkdir /media/pen" to create it.
An entry in /etc/fstab is also required if you want to avoid cryptic command 
lines to mount the pen drive. This would look something like:

/dev/sda1 /media/pen vfat user,noauto 0 0

To use the pen drive, you should now be able to plug it in to the USB port and 
mount it with:

mount /media/pen

And before unplugging it, unmount with:

umount /media/pen

Once you have confirmed the device can be mounted, accessed, and unmounted, 
you can create a desktop icon to perform the mount/unmount operations. Right 
click on an empty spot on the desktop and navigate to 'Create 
New'->'Device'->'MO Device'. Fill in the boxes and you should be set to go.

Setting the system up to support hotplugging is not as straight forward and 
may well interfere with the running of EMC should you insert/remove a pen 
drive.

Regards, Paul.