After about 4 hours of fiddling around with the thumbdrive I actually figured it out. I'm going to post my discoveries here in hopes of maybe helping somebody else who is just as a as I am can figure it out. The man pages are pretty pointless becuase they talk in ways a new person to linux cannot understand, and the tutorials assume your not as stupid as the average consumer such as myself.

/*
theMayor
April 2nd, 2005
Distro: RedHat 9
How to Mount a thumbdrive
*Must be root in order to do this
*/

Plug in the thumbdrive! Now type in on the command line

"cd /mnt/"

If one were to do an command named "ls" then you'd see the floopy and cdrom most likley. Make a new folder(whatever you wish to call it) where the files will appear. For this example I used a folder named "thumbdrive".

"mkdir thumbdrive"

After that creates the folder called "thumbdrive" were now ready for the difficult part. First thing is linux I noticed mounts your flash/thumb/jump drive usually in the device sda1. The only way that I've noticed how to double check this information is by running a hardware manager type program that comes pre-installed with linux in KDE or GNOME. This program is located at:

Red Hat Icon >> System Tools >> Hardware Browser

This should tell you for certain under the "hard drive" tabs where the device is located. If you look towards the bottom of the Hardware Browser, look in the size column and find the device that corosponds.

Now back in the command window for good measure make sure were in the same directory we just made our thumbdrive folder so type in:

"cd /mnt/"

now we are ready to "mount" the device and in doing so will actually use the thumbdrive folder.

"mount /dev/sda1 thumbdrive"

Ok, so what I've gathered so far from other tutorials is basically this. That line is saying "Mount the contents that are located on the device '/dev/sda1' and put the contents in thumbdrive". The only thing wrong with that logic is once the drive is shutoff it's done for. You'd have to repeat the process again in the future if you wish to remount(aside from making the thumbdrive folder).

There is a pretty non-distrobution-specific way to do this:
Edit your /etc/fstab and add this at the bottom:
Then what you want to do is type:
Now when you want to use it, plug it in then type:
Then before you unplug it type:
And yes, it is really "umount" not unmount!
Edit your /etc/fstab and add this at the bottom:
Then what you want to do is type:
Now when you want to use it, plug it in then type:
Then before you unplug it type:
And yes, it is really "umount" not unmount!




But if you don't can't get sda1 to work, try using sda or sdaX replacing X with a number.

I put two scripts on my desktop to mount and unmount the drive:
mount:
unmount:

calcon

Hey,
Thanks for the response and the pointers. My only question is where were you during my 4 hours :-P

thanks,
-theMayor

You're welcome.

Huh? What do you mean where was I during your four hours?

calcon

It was in my original post ...

-theMayor

OH!

Had you posted on this site somewhere asking how?

If you did I may not have seen it or it may have been when I was on vacation.

calcon

hi,

i just started to work with linux, and by the way, thanks for the tip on mounting the flash disk. i just want to add that wont it be better to create a simple alias to mount and umount the drive.

simply edit the bashrc file and add the alias definition (if u are using some other script same can be done there). In this way, all users of the system would be able to mount and umount the drives.
regards