Red Hat Knowledgebase

The output of fdisk -l should list all detected partitions. It will indicate the partition name and number that contains the FAT file system.

For example:

# fdisk -l /dev/sde Disk /dev/sde: 255 MB, 255590400 bytes 8 heads, 61 sectors/track, 1022 cylinders Units = cylinders of 488 * 512 = 249856 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sde1 1 1022 249337+ e Win95 FAT16 (LBA)

You will noticed that /dev/sde1 is the device ID containing a FAT16 file system.

Once you have identified the partition name you can mount it using the mount command. However, you must first prepare a mount point for the file system, such as /mnt/fat. This can be done simply by creating a directory. For example, type

mkdir /mnt/fat

Once you have a mount point the drive can be mounted by a command similar to the following:

mount /dev/sde1 /mnt/fat

Once mounted you should be able to navigate the volume from /mnt/fat as you would browse it under Windows. If you stop here the device will not be mounted on the next boot. You can cause the system to attempt to mount the file system during every boot by modifying the /etc/fstab file and adding a line similar to the following:

/dev/sde1 /mnt/fat vfat defaults 1 2

See the man mount and man fstab for more details.