Cheat Sheet - USB drives

[benrett]

The following is a cheat sheet of some of the more common commands for using a USB drive with a Pi. I've written an extensive tutorial on using USB drives on a Pi shell at http://ipggi.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/u ... pberry-pi/. It covers power supply issues, mounts, performance, disk file formats, compatibility and formating.

To mount a USB drive:

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sudo mkdir /mnt/usbdrive
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usbdrive
ls /mnt/usbdrive

To list your file systems:

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sudo fdisk -l
sudo mount -l
df -h

Before disconnecting a USB drive:

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sudo umount /dev/sda1

Format a drive to Linux EXT4

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sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1 -L untitled

Add Apple OS X HFS+ read/write support

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sudo apt-get install hfsutils hfsprogs hfsutils

Format a drive to HFS+

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sudo mkfs.hfsplus /dev/sda1 -v untitled

Add Windows NTFS read/write support

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sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g

Format a drive to NTFS

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sudo mkfs.ntfs /dev/sda1 -f -v -I -L untitled

Add Windows/DOS FAT32 read/write support

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sudo apt-get install dosfstools

Format a drive to FAT32

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sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/sda1 -n untitled

[klricks]

Good but you might add a section about permissions.
Especially important when attaching a drive which has been in use on another system then attached to the RPi.
My 2T drive (ext3) was attached to an ARM based NAS with Snake (Linux) and had lots of files, but when moved to the RPi, I could only access the files as root.
Finally figured out that I had to chown and chmod all the existing directories and files.

[benrett]

That’s a very good point klricks and is something some people may forget. Linux permissions and ownerships propagate on EXT drives.

[philhudson91]

Very useful post. Thanks

[jbeale]

Mount a VFAT format USB drive so that user 'pi' can write to it:

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sudo mount -o uid=pi,gid=pi /dev/sda1 /mnt/usbdrive

If your USB drive has 'ext4' format, the above command will not work: EXT4-fs (sda1): Unrecognized mount option "uid=1000" or missing value

To mount a EXT4 format USB drive so that user 'pi' can write to it:

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sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usbdrive
sudo chown pi:pi /mnt/usbdrive
sudo chmod 777 /mnt/usbdrive

[DavidA]

Hi, I formatted a USB drive with a small ext4 system partition and a large NTFS data partition. It works fine on the Pi, but when I plug the drive into a Windows 7 laptop Windows doesn't recognise the format of the data partition.

For the data partition I used:

sudo mkfs.ntfs -Q -L Data /dev/sda2

Please can you suggest what I can do to fix this please?

(I want Windows to be able to access the drive so that I can directly copy large amounts of data to it.)

[MrEngman]

Hi, I formatted a USB drive with a small ext4 system partition and a large NTFS data partition. It works fine on the Pi, but when I plug the drive into a Windows 7 laptop Windows doesn't recognise the format of the data partition.

For the data partition I used:

sudo mkfs.ntfs -Q -L Data /dev/sda2

Please can you suggest what I can do to fix this please?

(I want Windows to be able to access the drive so that I can directly copy large amounts of data to it.)

I expect Windows cannot access the drive because the first partition is not ntfs and it does not recognise Linux partitions.



MrEngman

[John Mc]

This is a great resource, Thank you for posting it.
I also found the more detailed write up you posted Use USB hard disk & flash drives with your Raspberry Pi very helpful.

I thought I'd mention that there are utilities out there that add the ability to create, read, and write ExFAT formatted drives from within Raspian. You can install this with the following command:

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sudo apt-get install exfat-fuse exfat-utils

Once installed, I believe the command to format a drive to ExFAT is

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mkfs.exfat

This has made things very convenient for me, since I work in a mixed Mac/Windows/Raspian environment. and sometimes need to shuffle .img files that are larger than the FAT32 4GB limit. Also, my larger USB thumb drives all seem to come pre-formatted as ExFAT.

You may want to update this cheat sheet as well as your excellent more detailed guide, Use USB hard disk & flash drives with your Raspberry Pi.

Another mention: It seems the Raspian-stretch OS will automatically mount drives when they are plugged in. They do not mount to the /mnt folder however.

[marciano]

After first steps on a ext4 formatted card

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df

/dev/sda1 30544908 57888 28912364 1% /mnt/usbdrive
/dev/sdb1 30544908 99620 28870632 1% /media/pi/Label1

[jahboater]

"lsblk" is a very useful command.