How to Mount an External Storage Device from the Command Line

February 1, 2025

Written by Sean David Reed

OS/Distro: Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS

Mount

Connect the drive to your machine and open the terminal.
Navigate to mnt/ and make sure there is an empty directory to act as the mount point.
```
$ cd /mnt
$ mkdir externaldrive
```
Determine the name of your device with lsblk (if you need to know the format of your drives filesystem, you can run lsblk -f). In my case, these were the results:

![/images/how-to-mount-an-external-storage-device-from-the-command-line/01.png](Screenshot of mounted block devices viewed with the lsblk command)
Mount the drive to your empty directory. Note: when I first tried this step I ran sudo mount /dev/sdb /mnt/externaldrive, which didn't work. I had to specify the partition, not the disk.
```
$ sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/externaldrive
```
Done! You can now navigate to your mount point and access your external drive.
```
$ cd /mnt/externaldrive
$ ls
```

Unmount the drive. This is not the same as safely removing the drive, which comes next.

$ sudo umount /mnt/externaldrive # OR the next command
$ udisksctl unmount -b /dev/sdb1

Power off the drive. This command will safely eject the drive and spin down the platters. Note: the command uses /dev/sdb not /dev/sdb1 since we are powering down the whole device, not just a partition - powering down a partition doesn't make sense anyway.
```
$ udisksctl power-off -b /dev/sdb
```
Done! You can now detach the usb connection.