This page is about using external devices, like USB keys or external hard drives with your Arch laptop.

I decided to manually mount devices (it is quick and simple) and avoid auto-mounting any device.

Listing devices is done via:

lsblk

lsblk will show you the devices being recognized by your laptop. You sould see your internal hard drive·s, plus external devices being currently connected, like USB keys or external hard drives. Here is an example of lsblk output.

In this example, my internal disk is named nvme0n1. 3 partitions are defined on it: a boot partition (nvme0n1p1), a swap partition (nvme0n1p2) and a partition with actual data (nvme0n1p3).

Similarly, lsblk detected my external hard drive as device, named sda. It contains a single partition named sda1.

In order to access the external hard drive, it must be mounted at some mount point (=folder) in your unique global folder hierarchy rooted at /.

For example, create, if not done yet, a folder in /mnt/gdy:

mkdir /mnt/gdy

Mount the external device' sda1 partition on it:

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/gdy

Indeed, referring to device sda1 is done via the virtual path /dev/sda1.

Once this command has been performed, typing

ls /mnt/gdy

will show you the root files and folders being present on your external device.

Before disconnecting your external device, unmount it first by typing:

umount /mnt/gdy

When lsblk shows a device and its partition·s, you must mount a partition (ie, sda1), and not the base device itself (ie, sda). Sometimes, though, no partitio appears, like for this USB key, recognized as sda:

Mounting this key is then done via a command like:

mount /dev/sdb /mnt/key

NTFS support

In case you need NTFS support, you may install the package allowing Arch to read NTFS-formatted devices:

pacman -S ntfs-3g