How To Mount In Ubuntu

There are a lot of tasks you’ll come across during everyday use of the Ubuntu operating system, and the many other great Linux distributions. One of the most common is mounting drives, either internal or external ones like a solid-state drive or a portable USB drive. Mounting a drive makes it more accessible for read/write operations to Ubuntu in the root file system, which is the deeper part of your operating system. It will give it a directory on Ubuntu, and what’s known as a mount point.

These tasks are usually done automatically on Windows 11 in the background for you, but it’s much different on Ubuntu. There are two ways to do this on Ubuntu. It can be done either through the graphical user interface or with the command line.

What is Ubuntu? The ins and outs of one of the most popular Linux distros

When it comes to Linux, one of its most mainstream implementations is Ubuntu. Here’s everything you need to know.

How to mount a drive in Ubuntu with the GUI

The quickest and easiest way

The simplest way to mount a drive in Ubuntu is by using the Files app. The Files app offers a Graphical user Interface (GUI) where you can click through things easily. Here’s a peek at how.

Plug in the drive you want to mount to Ubuntu. Either externally, or internally.
Open the Files app. Search for it by pressing the Super key, or the Windows Key on your keyboard.
Once The Files app is open, right-click on the name of the drive in the sidebar and choose Mount.
If you don’t see the drive that you want to mount, choose Other Locations in the sidebar, pick the drive, then right-click it and choose Mount.

Keep in mind, that once a drive is mounted, you’ll want to eject it to ensure data isn’t lost. Ubuntu will treat the drive as active storage and might read and write data to it. Don’t just unplug the drive. Right-click it again and choose eject.

How to mount a drive in Ubuntu with the Terminal

For the more experienced user

More sophisticated Ubuntu users might want to mount a drive using the terminal. This is typically used by system administrators, but it takes a bit of extra work. You’ll need to go through several steps.

Open a terminal session.
To list all of your drives on your system, run the command sudo fdisk -l. Note the name of the drive. In our case, it’s sdc. Keep in mind that hard disks are assigned as sda, sdb, or sdc. The partitions in a particular hard disk are defined as sda1, and so forth.
Once ready to mount, create a mount directory with the command sudo mkdir /mnt/sdd. Be sure to replace sdd with the name you want your drive to mount. It can be anything you want.
Mount the drive with the command sudo mount /dev/sdc /mnt/sdd. Again, replace sdd with the actual name of your drive that you want to be, it could be anything. If you are mounting an NTFS drive, skip to the next section.
Run the command df -h to view any file system or drive you might have just mounted.

Once the drive is mounted, it’s good practice to eject it, just as we did in the GUI section above. This will avoid data loss. And that’s it! You’ve just mounted a drive in Ubuntu.

Mount an NTFS drive

If you want to mount an NTFS drive, then you can follow the following steps. These will allow you to mount the drive as read-write.

To mount an NTFS drive as read-only, follow steps one through three above, then run the following command: sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sdc /mnt/sdc. Again, replace sdc with whatever you want the device to be named.
To mount as read-write, you’ll first need to install Fuse and NTFS-3g. These may already be included in your distro, but if not, run: sudo apt install fuse ntfs-3g
Finally, run sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdbc /mnt/sddwhere sdd is the name that you chose earlier.

That’s it!

There’s a lot more to do on Ubuntu

In the day-to-day use of Ubuntu, mounting drives is one thing that you might run across. You might want to change your hostname, too, so you can give your computer a more network-friendly name. Other than that, if you’re a developer, it’s a great idea to install things like MySQL, and even Java. There’s a ton you can do on Ubuntu, and mounting drives is just the start.