How to Mount usb drive and other questions
 

Hi,

Thanks in advance for the help. I have never used any Linux based products, so please assume I know nothing. I have just installed ububtu on my Acer Aspire AOA 110 notebook. When I plugged in the usb flash drive a message came up saying I am not allowed to'mount' the drive, detail tag'you have to be a superuser o mount drive'. How do I correct this.

I also have problems activating the wireless connection, and if I get it to connect, I cannot access the internet.

It would be appreciated if someone can assist, step by step with the above.

Thanks

Hey,

Once the kernel discovers that a new storage device was found, (you can verify this via dmesg), linux creates a new block device for it under /dev/, you can verify this by running the command:

You should see a new entry after you insert the USB drive.

Afterwards, create a "mount point" a place to "install" the drive:
At this point your file manager should be able to see the new drive.

source: http://linuxconfig.org/Howto_mount_USB_drive_in_Linux

- - - - - -

For your wireless problem, most likely ubuntu doesnt have the drivers for your netbook's wireless chipset out-of-the-box, some chipsets have non-free drivers that ubuntu cant use by default, but ubuntu does give the option to install those drivers. Thats the main reason why I switched to fedora since it had the drivers ubuntu didnt for my chipset out of the box

Thanks for the reply, I will give it a try.

Regards

You missed the part where he actually mounts it. Also, there is no need to name the mount location after the device name.

It's very simple. Just make a directory where you want to mount the drive. You can call it /mnt/drive, /jim/bob, it doesn't matter. You do this with:
Then determine your drive name with:
Finally, mount the drive with:

For a full example, say fdisk tells you your drive is /dev/sdc, and the partition you want to mount is /dev/sdc1:

The Acer Aspire AOA 110 ships with about 5 different Wifi cards... from a terminal, run lspci and show the output...

It may be as simple as enabling the backports repository in the synaptic package manager...

Also, Ubuntu will typically automount USB drives by default setup... what version of Ubuntu are you running???

Hi All,

I have posted a reply earlier, but it seems I have made a mistake. I can't see it now. Thanks for the advice, but I am no further. I told you I am a TOTAL novice. I am not sure what version of 'ubuntu' I have. I installed it through Easy Peasy on Monday. If I start up the computer in comes up as ubuntu eee. Where do I look for the version?

Also if I type in any of the code you have given me, I get the message ' Nautilus cannot handle this kind of location'. I probably enter it in the wrong location.

Am I too stupid to get it fixed and should I rather get someone to fix it form me, or would it be possible for someone on this forum to take me through step by stem from the home screen.

Thanks for the support anyway.

cheers

You need to run these commands from a terminal, not in the file browser. You should be able to find a terminal in the menu somewhere, under system or utilities or something like that.

Thanks, I got it.

I entered lspci and got a response. I have taken a photograph of the screen, as I was unable to get it onto this post in any other way, and it is attached to thie post as a jpg.

Thanks

Found at the AskUbuntu website...

From a terminal, execute the command:
Check if you find:
In the file,... and delete the number sign. If you can't find that line, please add at the end of the file:
and leave a blank return line at the end (I do, at least...)... save the blacklist file and reboot.

Then open a terminal again and use the following command:

Oops, follow-up...

In a terminal:
Reboot after...

Thanks for your help JaseP.

I followed your instruction, and everything worked up to the point where I have to enter 'sudo rfkill list' after I have restarted. It says: 'command not found'. When I tried it again from the beginning, the 'blacklist acer_wmi' comes up after entering: sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf, so the file is there, but once again, it cannot find the command.

Any suggestions???

Is there anything on that machine that you want to keep?

If not, I'd recommend downloading a copy of either Ubuntu 10.04 LTS or Kubuntu 10.04 LTS,... 32-bit versions, and installing those... The latest official Ubuntu version, 12.04 LTS, has some "issues" in my opinion. Version 12.10 isn't in an official release yet.

Easy-peasy is a derivitive of Ubuntu, geared for netbooks. I've never been particularly fond of it. From the looks of it, it doesn't come with a gnome environment installed. More likely, it's built on the more lighweight xfce window manager.

As a newbie,... you'll be better off with a more mainstream distro.

Thanks JaseP.

There is nothing on the machine I would want to keep.

The problem is I have no internet connection, cannot mount a flash drive, and there is no disk drive.

I suppose I have to uninstall the current version of ubuntu and then re-install one of the other version.

I will give it a try, thanks

I think you should definitely follow JaseP's advice and get a different, more stable version, but if you really want to mount that flash drive, suicidalegroll's instructions from post #4 (entered from a terminal) will work perfectly.

Thanks BloomingNutria,

I tried that as well. I get to the second step: 'mkdir /mnt/{in my case sdb}', and then the response is 'mkdir: cannot create directory mnt/sdb/: Permission denied'

I cannot get beyond that point.

However, I will look at the other versions of ubuntu as recommended.

Thanks

Ah. That is because you entered

instead of

The command 'sudo' allows you to take superuser (or root) privileges for one command. After you enter this line of code, you will be prompted for your root password. You need to enter the password as directed and then proceed with the instructions.

This is necessary because only the superuser has the permissions necessary to create a directory there.

Or, of course, you could just switch to another Ubuntu.

long n short of getting a flash drive set to mount.

as root

# mkdir /mnt/foo replace foo with something that you can remember ie: usb
# fdisk -l from that you are looking for the /dev/sdX and the file type of the flash drive
# fdisk /dev/sdX (if you wish to format it for ext3 to run native in Linux) Ignore this step if you want to leave it as FAT32
d (this will delete all partitions on the drive)
n (create new partitions)
p (for primary)
1 (you only need 1 partition atm)
hit enter until it is prompting again without quesitons
w (write the change to the drive)
# mkfs -t ext3 /dev/<partition>
# tune2fs -c 0 /dev/<partition> only if you do not want to have the system force a file check after roughly 120 mounts
# vi /etc/fstab
add the following entry:

/dev/<partition> /mnt/foo ext3 auto,users,rw 0 0

if you want user to be able to mount/umount the drive then you need to add the following to visudo

at the end of the user line:

, /bin/mount /mnt/foo, /bin/umount /mnt/foo

then mount the drive:

# mount /mnt/foo
# chmod 4777 /mnt/foo (this is really really lose, not safe unless you KNOW you are the ONLY one with acesss to your system) if not set the permissions chmod 755 /mnt/foo
# if you set 755, then you need to also chown -Rf user:users_group /mnt/foo
# umount /mnt/foo
# exit
$ sudo /bin/mount /mnt/foo (no trailing / just like you did in visudo)
$ touch /mnt/foo/test if this works without permissions issues you are set.

fin.