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Copy Files From Lexar USB Drive In Slackware 12.1

I have no clue how to mount a usb drive in Slackware, lsusb shows the drive; but cd /dev/sda returns an error. Please help.

I think this is the first time I would suggested a google search on this forum, because usually I think it's a counterproductive advice, but if you want to survive on slackware, you'll have to gather a lot of information, and how to mount a usb drive is about the easiest task imaginable.
Searching this forum for "mount usb" should return good results too. (It's the same on all distributions if there is no automount feature available or working)

As a rule you always mount a device on the filing system tree of Linux.

You can ask Linux to tell you what is the name of the partition of the USB device by command

Code:

fdisk -l

From the display you can see the capacity of the hard disk to tell it is the USB device. Also USB memory devices are factory-partition with type Fat16 or Fat32 filing systems.

Say the device you want to mount in the USB is sdb1 you can mount it with commands

Code:

mkdir /mnt/sdb1

mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1

ls /mnt/sdb1

If there is output from the last command then the device has been mounted successfully.

When you finish make sure you unmount the device by either

Code:

umount /dev/sdb1

Code:

umount /mnt/sdb1

Premature withdrawal of the USB device without properly unmounting it can cause damage to the files. Yes remember to unmount use the command "umount".

As a rule only the root user has the privilege to mount devices.