This is another one of my āmeat-and-potatoesā Raspberry Pi Instructables.
What this Instructable will show you how to do is to configure your Raspberry Pi to recognize and automatically mount a USB thumb drive. This is especially useful for exchanging files, running backups and using your Pi as a media device.
Before doing this Instructable, please make sure you have your Raspberry Pi up and running, which you can do with The Ultimate Raspberry Pi Configuration GuideĀ Instructable.
Iām using the Mac OS for this guide, but you can extend the principles to other operating systems.
Step 1: Format the Thumb Drive
Step 2: Run package updates
ssh [email protected] you are running directly hooked into the monitor, you can skip this step.
Run the latest package update and upgrades, just to make s
ure everything is current ā you will have to have wifi access for this step.
First the update:
sudo apt-get update
Then the upgrade:
sudo apt-get upgrade
Youāll see a spool of package updates, which will take several minutes.
Step 3: Set up a āmounting pointā for the USB drive
Now, unplug your USB power cable. Put the formatted USB drive into the Raspberry Pi. And turn the Pi back on.
Iām not sure if this matters, but I always leave the
wi-fi dongle in the lower USB port and use the upper one for the external USB drive/keyboard/other things.
Wait a few seconds and then ssh back into the Pi.
ssh [email protected]
What we then type in;
mkdir usbdrv
What we are going to set up is aĀ mount point ā a way to always map this directory to the USB drive.
now, type in:
sudo blkid
check out output ā we are looking for the USB d
rive device info, which is easy to identify because we called it GITPI when we initialized it.
Mine reads:
/dev/sda1: LABEL=āGITPIā UUID=ā6D34-1514ā³ TYPE=āvfatā
This should be the similar on yours: /dev/sda1 is the USB thumb drive device.
Now, we are going to edit what is called theĀ file systems tableĀ to make the USB drive map into the usbdrv directory
Type in:
sudo nano /etc/fstab
Here is the tricky part. We are going to modify the fstab file so that this device maps to the usbdrv directory.
add the line to the end of the file (you can copy and paste this line)
/dev/sda1Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā /home/pi/usbdrv Ā Ā Ā vfatĀ Ā Ā uid=pi,gid=pi,umask=0022,sync,auto,nosuid,rw,nouser 0Ā Ā 0
important: this is 1 line, not broken up over
two linesĀ (the Instructable is doing weird things to the formatting).
What this does is to map the /dev/sda1 device ā any thumb USB drive to the usbdrv directory. The flags are ones that I cribbed from the Thomas Loughlin guide. Admittedly, Iām not sure exactly what they do, except for allow the drive to be a read-write drive and not tied to a specific user.
For more detail: Mounting a USB Thumb Drive with the Raspberry Pi