How to Mount an External Hard Drive on Linux

You’ll see something like this:

NAME   MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda      8:0    0  500G  0 disk
└─sda1   8:1    0  500G  0 part /
sdh      8:112  0 10.9T  0 disk
└─sdh1   8:113  0 10.9T  0 part

Here, sdh is the new external drive (10.9T, no mount point yet) and sdh1 is its one partition. Your internal disk (sda) shows what “already mounted” looks like — notice the / under MOUNTPOINTS.

How do you know which one is your drive?

Compare the size to what you’d expect, and confirm it appeared only after you plugged the drive in — unplug it and re-run lsblk if you’re unsure; the entry will disappear.

NAME   FSTYPE FSVER LABEL     UUID                     FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
sdh
└─sdh1 ntfs         easystore F402AD5802AD209A

FSTYPE here is ntfs — this drive was formatted on a Windows machine, common for pre-formatted external drives. Other values you might see:

ext4 — native Linux  ·  exfat — cross-platform, common on newer USB drives  ·  vfat — older cross-platform format (FAT32)

This matters because NTFS isn’t natively read/write-safe in the Linux kernel the way ext4 is — it needs a helper driver called ntfs-3g (Step 4).

It can be anywhere you have write access — a common convention is /mnt/something or /media/something for system-wide mounts, or just a folder in your home directory for personal use.

-p means “create parent folders too if needed, and don’t error if it already exists.” The folder should ideally be empty — if it already has files in it, those files are hidden (not deleted, just inaccessible) while something is mounted on top.

If that prints a path (e.g. /usr/bin/ntfs-3g), you’re set. If nothing prints, install it:

$ sudo apt install ntfs-3g  Debian/Ubuntu
$ sudo dnf install ntfs-3g  Fedora
$ sudo pacman -S ntfs-3g   Arch

If your drive is ext4, exfat, or vfat, the kernel usually handles it natively and you can skip this step (for exfat on older distros you may need exfatprogs or exfat-utils).

Breaking that down, piece by piece:

For an ext4 drive, ownership already exists inside the filesystem, so you’d typically just run:

$ sudo mount /dev/sdh1 ~/myEasyStore

If mounted correctly, you’ll see the drive listed with its size and usage:

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdh1        11T  3.2T  7.8T  30% /home/you/myEasyStore

You can also just ls ~/myEasyStore and see the drive’s actual files appear.

Sanity check tip: mount | grep sdh1 shows the exact options it mounted with — handy if something (like ownership) doesn’t look right.

To keep things fast, Linux doesn’t always write data to the physical disk the instant a copy “finishes” — it buffers writes in memory and flushes them shortly after. Pull the drive before that flush happens and a file can end up incomplete, or the filesystem’s own bookkeeping can get corrupted. umount exists specifically to force that flush before you disconnect.

a. Make sure nothing is still using it

A terminal cd’d into the folder, or a program with a file open, will make umount refuse with “target is busy.” Find the culprit:

$ sudo fuser -vm ~/myEasyStore

b. Flush any pending writes (optional)

umount does this automatically, but if you just finished a large copy, it’s a good habit to watch it settle first:

$ sync

c. Unmount

$ sudo umount ~/myEasyStore

Once this returns without error, it’s safe to remove the drive — even without running sync yourself.

d. Power the drive down first (optional)

The command-line equivalent of “Safely Remove Hardware,” useful for drives that spin down slowly:

$ udisksctl power-off -b /dev/sdh

e. Physically disconnect

Once umount (or power-off) has returned cleanly and the activity light is idle, unplug the cable.