USB stick is now mounted as /media/usb0 insted of dev/sdb

[michel]

Greetings,

For a while now my USB drives are mounted under media/usb0 media/usb1 etc.. but when I need to access them through command line I do so with dev/sdb and dev/sdc etc.. Why is that? How can I make them mount to dev as they used to?

Thanks,

Michel

[oshunluvr]

My 12.10 install doesn't do that here. Did you select "Auto mounting of removable devices" in settings?

Edit: Oh yeah, duh. See the post below...

[claydoh]

/dev/sdX is the actual device itself (the actual hardware)
/media/usb* is the mount point (where the system looks for files and directories)

http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/09/...tem-structure/

[michel]

I'm saving that info!

But why is my system mounting the USB devices under /dev and showing them under /media? It did not use to to that until recently after some update.

This is specially a pain when it comes to automated backups. I used to have my external hard drive always mounted as /dev/sdb1/ so I could automate backups. Now it is sometime mounted as sdb0 and some other times as sdb1 etc..

Thanks,

Michel

[michel]

Yes automout is checked.

Thanks,

Michel

[claydoh]

Linux has always had devices listed in /dev/ , they have never been mounted there. (I don't believe it is even possible to mount something in /dev). The device itself is not the same as where the files are mounted.

The question is why it mounts your usb devices as /media/usbX as opposed to /media/some-string-of-characers That i do not see, I have automount on, a variety of usb drives connected at any time across 2 systems, and it does not do the usbX thing.


The sda. sdb etc used to be the norm, but now as devices are removable and swapable, it uses a uuid to keep things in order, even for internal drives

[jlittle]

But why is my system mounting the USB devices under /dev and showing them under /media?

You seem to be confusing devices and file systems; common usage often blurs the distinction. Devices may have file systems on them. File systems are mounted some place in the directory tree, rooted at /. File systems have never been mounted under /dev; ubuntus have always mounted the file systems on removable media in /media, as far back as I can remember. /mnt was the traditional unix place. Sometimes the thing appearing in /dev is called the raw device.

If the file system on your removable device has a label, ubuntu will use that label when it mounts it in /media. It would seem that your USB sticks don't have labels. I imagine you have experience with a system that, in the absence of a label, used the device name (as appears in /dev, sdb1 f.ex) as the mount point name, and this has changed. You can use gparted¹ to change the label; if you want to do it from the command line have a read of https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RenameUSBDrive. This is the automatic mounting the system does; you can mount stuff whereever you want to I suppose, using mount commands; you can change the automatic "udev rules" if you want to, too.

Regards, John Little
¹ The KDE partition editor says "This file system does not support setting a label." for fat32 file systems, typically used on USB sticks.

[michel]

I just wanted to close that thread.

I reinstalled 12.04.2 and now my issue is gone. My usb devices are now mounted under media but in a consistent way and with a clear UUID description such as /media/500G for my external hard drive and /media/1496-D24E/ for my usb stick.

There was an issue with my broken system and a reinstall solved it.