Removable media

Mounting removable media, like CDs, DVDs, USB drives or memory cards, needs special handling, because most often you want a regular user to be able to mount ad-hoc an unknown device.

Prerequisites

 * Kernel support for your storage device.
 * Kernel support for your filesystem.

Groups
See https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Udisks#Groups

Mounting removable media
For mounting as a normal user without root privileges the device needs an entry with the user option in fstab.

Plug the removable medium to the computer then run or.

The line displays the UUID A0C1-98A1 to be added to. Let's call it "pendrive" and create a mountpoint for it and add an entry in.

With the user option in this entry, it can be mounted / unmounted by normal users.

To see what is mounted, run without arguments or :

Mounting without the fstab entry can be done by root only.

For further details see.

Once the device is connected and mounted, you can access it like a normal hard disk. Usual operations like, , , etc work fine. You could also create a filesystem on the device and format it.

MTP
For media using the MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) protocol see the MTP article.

udisks
udisks is a daemon to manage mounting of removable media. It mounts filesystems to subfolders of.

KDE
KDE supports udisks with its Solid framework. After plugging in the media shows up:
 * in the device notifier widget
 * in the start menu under Computer -> Places
 * in Dolphin in the sidebar under Places