2.2 KiB
Mounting disks
On MacOS, there's diskutil which handles everything to do with disks and
partitioning all in one. It also has a graphical frontend. Macs by default
automatically mount readable external media into /Volumes and nothing explicit
needs to be done, although diskutil can trigger this as well
In Linux, the functionality of this tool is broken up into fdisk, lsblk,
df, parted, and mount. For querying information, these overlap heavily and
can often be used interchangeably. lsblk is often sufficient to query external
drives, with the following options:
lsblkf -o name,label,fstype,mountpoint,size,state
However, mount is a particularly bad substitute for diskutil. For one it
needs root privileges for something as simple as mounting a usb stick. It also
doesn't create mount pointer for us in /Volumes, we have do to that manually
Instead, it's a good idea to install udisks2. "Easier" distros typically come
with this or something similar preinstalled. udisksctl is much more similar to
diskutil. It'll mount drives without requiring root into
/run/media/<username>/, using the EFI label for that partition
udisksctl help
udisksctl mount -b /dev/sda2
udisksctl mount -b /dev/sda3
You can mount multiple partitions from the same block device at the same time
Do not try to mix mount and udisksctl! This can lead to some severe
nonsense, like ghost disks. Before using udisksctl consider checking the
output of mount. Note that lsblk may know less than mount and df
There are no guarantees that an external drive will have any particular name.
This is problematic in scripts and requires an lsblk every time before
mounting external media. Instead you can use the automatically created symlink
in /dev/disk/by-*. For example, a partition with label hey_hey can always be
mounted with
udisksctl mount -b /dev/disk/by-label/hey_hey
There can presumably be problems with conflicting partition labels, though it's
better not to use udisksctl in that case either. /dev/disk/by-id/* uses WWID
for identification, which is stored on the hardware for the drive and guaranteed
to be universally unique. That's a better idea for the fstab file