This should work for any Linux distro as well.

My love affair with Crunchbang came to an end. It almost made me crawl back to Ubuntu. It got so upset about me using XFCE even after removing it (i get all sorts of “Fontconfig warning: ”/etc/fonts/conf.d/65-droid-sans-fonts.conf”, line 138: Having multiple values in isn’t supported and may not work as expected” and it took away my file manager when I needed it most….

One evening after I had written a rather important document, I attempted to get a Pokemon Emulator on my Linuxmachine. Linuxmachine said No. LinuxMachine was upset of my need for nostalgia, and then wouldn’t let me use Thunar, my file manager. Now I had a problem where my important document was trapped on the machine. At the time my internet was out, so there was no way to email the file to myself. I wanted to get a file off my computer onto a flash drive, so I tried accessing /media/usb. Unfortunately, there was nothing to be found.

Now, there is a “SOLVED” thread in Crunchbang forum regarding this topic but it leaves alot to be desired.

Where is my USB?

I chose a USB file that had a brand name so I could figure out where it is: “Kingston”. I also plugged in my USB into one of the back, not side, ports.

I made a call for the USB with the command sudo blkid This appeared:

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/dev/sda1: UUID="571f8944-f1c0-41c3-9c07-0bc230979c28" TYPE="ext4" 
/dev/sda5: UUID="7db77cd0-32a4-4a91-b58b-af24b09deddb" TYPE="swap" 
/dev/sdb1: LABEL="KINGSTON" UUID="FAAE-8D60" TYPE="vfat"

There’s my Kingston! Your USB stick will be listed under sdb, not sda.

Mount that sucker!

So I found where my USB was listed, all I needed to do was mount it to my media directory: sudo mount /dev/sdb1 If you’re following along, the next stop is to enter your media directory with cd /media/usb and if you’re lucky, your files will be there.

But my files still aren’t there!

Did you get this error message?

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mount: can't find /dev/sdb1 in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab

This is because you need to specify where to mount it, meaning your media directory. Try this command, which tells it what and where to mount it.

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sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /media/usb

Now try cd /media/usb and voila! Your files should be there.

Unmount your USB via the terminal

You must be out of the /media file when you unmount it. Otherwise you get an error message that the device is “busy” (/media/usb0: device is busy.). I learned that the command is not “unmount” but actually this:

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sudo umount /media/usb