Format And Mount Drive onto Robotino

This page will go though the process of taking a USB key and mounting it to the Robotino

Formatting

If you are setting up a drive for the first time you will need to format it before you can mount it.

The first step it to find the location of the drive you are looking for, this can be done using the command:

fdisk -l

This will give you a list of drives. Typically the drive you will be looking for is:

/dev/sda

But this could be different. Look for the drive that is the size you are expecting.

Once you have the name of the drive you can format it. The command you want to use is:

mkfs.ext3

This will make a file system using the ext3 format. We use this format because it is what Robotino uses for it's main file system.

So you can format your /dev/sda drive with the command:

mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda

It might give you:

/dev/sda is entire device, not just one partition!

This is fine. proceed with yes. The message might be different so be sure to read it. It will take a few minutes to format the drive. Once done the device will be formatted and you can move on to mounting the drive.

Mounting

Once you have an ext3 formatted USB you will be able to mount the drive onto the existing file system.

Using "fdisk -l" to find the name of the device you can mount the drive with the command:

mount

Before you mount the drive you need to setup a new empty directory to mount the device to. For example this will make a new directory in the /mnt directory.

mkdir /mnt/data

With the device name and a new directory you can mount the drive to the directory:

mount /dev/sda /mnt/data

After this, all data that is stored in the "/mnt/data" directory will be stored on the USB key.

Unmounting

Important Note:

Before you remove the USB from the Robotino you should unmount the drive, this can be done with the command:

umount /dev/sda