Can't Mount USB
 

I am trying to mount my USB to store pictures and music. I am running Arch with i3 and using udisks to mount.

when I run lsblk it says my USB is located in /dev/sda

when I do udisks --mount /dev/sdb I get

Mount failed: Error mounting: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superb lock on /dev/sdb, missing codepage or helper program, or other error.

Any ideas?

Please post the complete output of lsblk.

NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 465.8G 0 disks
sda1 8:1 0 20.8G 0 part /
sda2 8:2 0 150G 0 part /home
sda3 8:3 0 5G 0 part /boot
sdb 8:16 1 7.5G 0 disk
sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom


sdb used to say KINGSTON and its UUID but ever since I ran udisks command it doesn't.

Generally, you need to mount something like /dev/sdb1 rather than /dev/sdb. /dev/sdb is the physical disk, while the partitions are the entries that are numbered.

Have you taken a look with parted with the argument /dev/sdb to make sure that you have the disk partitioned?

When I installed Arch I made partions sda1,2,and 3. When the usb is not in sdb is not on lsblk. What do I need to do with gparted to make sure sdb is partitioned? I'm not sure I understand your question :/

If there isn't a partition with a filesystem on the USB drive, you won't be able to use it.

The physical drive is listed as a block device, but you can't mount a disk even though you can use something like dd to write a disk image to the physical device itself. You can only mount a filesystem that resides on a partition on a disk.

So what do I need to do on gparted to make the USB usable?

Make a partition. Then, format the partition with a file system. And you should be good to go.

You might want to use gparted, parted, cfdisk or fdisk. I don't know exactly what you have available on your system. gparted is the most GUI option. I'd show you what it looked like, but I don't have it installed :)

Technically partitioning a drive is not a requirement. You can format the entire Drive if desired. I have a few imation USB drives that are not partitioned. If the drive does not have any data that needs to be recovered just use gparted to create a partition and format as desired.

Still confused on exactly what to do, I thought udisks was suppose to do all the work and maybe it just has a simple error that can be fixed?

udisks does all the work on mounting a filesystem. If there is no filesystem udisks can not work. You will have to create a partition and format it with a filesystem of your choice to enable udisks to do the work.