Trouble with mounting my usb drive

Question

This question probably seems like a duplicate, but I can't find the answer anywhere.

I have a usb flash drive, that I know for a fact is identified by the Pi because I ran lsusb and tail -f /var/log/messages and both Id'd it. But there was one funny thing, the location was sda:

The way I TRIED to mount it was sudo mkdir /mnt/usb and sudo mount /dev/sda /mnt/usb and it succeeded, or at least, it didn't give any errors..

So I tried to cd to it with cd /media/SAMISCOOLCO (SAMISCOOLCO is the name if the usb) and it said no file/directory.. so what do I do!?

I need to be able to use the files from command line.. what do I do?

Answer 1

I see a couple of problems with your method:

1. You are mounting the drive itself, rather than the partition which holds the data on the drive. You would want to mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb
2. You are cd-ing to a different directory to the one you mounted to. If you've mounted it to /mnt/usb, then you need to cd /mnt/usb. However, if you've mounted it at /media/SAMISCOOLCO, you must cd /media/SAMISCOOLCO.

Also, a better method would be to take the USB Drive out, run ls /dev/sd* to see all devices beginning with sd (might be none), then plug the USB in again, run ls /dev/sd* again, and whichever one is new to the list is the one that your drive is. Just make sure you mount /dev/sdXn, not /dev/sdX. (where X is a letter and n is a number).