To access a USB device like a memory stick or USB hard drive, just plug it into an available USB port (check the left side of the Dell LCD monitors or under the gray front cover on some of the Dell Optiplex systems). This should result in the device being automatically mounted for you under /media/DEVICE_LABEL where "DEVICE_LABEL" is the label on the device. When you are finished using the device, you can safely unmount the filesystem by either:

• Select "Unmount Volume" from the File menu of the browser window that popped up when you inserted the device.

OR

• Run "eject /media/DEVICE_LABEL" from the command prompt, where DEVICE_LABEL is the same name used to access the device.

Once the device is unmounted, it is safe to unplug it. If you get a "device is busy" error when you try to eject/unmount the device then you have a process running that has the device open. This may be because you cd'ed to that directory so just cd back out of it and try again.

If you want to access a DOS format floppy disk, you can use mtools. This is a collection of commands that mimic the DOS commands and have the same names as the corresponding DOS commands just preceeded by the letter 'm'. For example, after you insert the floppy disk, you can get a directory listing of the files on the disk with:

mdir a:

You can copy files to/from the floppy using mcopy:

mcopy file.ext a:
mcopy a:file.ext /u/joe/file.ext

See the mtools man page for more details.

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