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Mount a USB key in VMware ESX 3.0.1


For anyone familiar with Linux, this is a trivial task. But for those new to Linux or VMware it might not seem straightforward. After many fruitless Google searches, I hope someone finds this helpful.The following worked on an HP DL380 G5. Your mileage may vary on different hardware.

Mounting a USB drive:

The “mount” command by itself will show you the currently mounted volumes.
# mount

First create a mount point:
# mkdir /mnt/usbkey

Now mount the drive:
# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usbkey -t vfat

Don’t forget to unmount it when your done.
# umount /dev/sda1

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 at 12:42 am and is filed under VMware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Mount a USB key in VMware ESX 3.0.1”

  1. David Green says:
    April 1, 2008 at 8:08 am

    Based on your post of last year regarding mounting a USB in ESX 3.0.1 I would expect this to be the same in 3.5. My question is whether this has any benefit to a VM. We have a USB DAT drive in an ML350 G5.

    Can you shed some light on this? We are only on the Foundation product so VMotion and DRS are not of importance in this instance.

  2. B. Segers says:
    April 28, 2008 at 3:36 am

    No success
    message:
    mount: /dev/sda1 is not a valid bock device.

    How can I see which devicefile I need??

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