Adding USB Drives to a Raspberry Pi

[Jim Manley]

I've just added a paragraph to the RPi Beginner's wiki page that points to another wiki page that describes how to attach, mount, and unmount USB flash or hard disk drives to your Pi:

http://elinux.org/Adding_USB_Drives_to_a_Raspberry_Pi

Some beginners should try out the instructions there and let me know how they might be improved if there is anything that isn't crystal clear. I need to add or link to another page on creating/modifying drive partitions, as noted by the [TBD] in the wiki page.

[greypower]

Looks good to me. Many thanks for doing this.

[prodata]

I appreciate that you don't want to bloat the text unnecessarily, but as a newcomer to the sort of architecture and OS that the Pi uses I'm wondering if an equally (perhaps more) important reason to want to use eg a USB stick is to separate user and system files more completely.

I'm already curious about how my current Debian 13-04-2012 could be updated; I get the impression (perhaps wrongly) that the only option is effectively to overwrite the existing SD card completely which would potentially erase any of my own working files that might be stored there. So I would be better off getting unambiguously into the habit of storing important working files elsewhere. Or is it possible to perform incremental updates to the existing Debian installation in situ?

[prodata]

And, to ask another dumb question: A USB stick seems to mount and be usable automatically when viewed through a GUI File Manager, but the same doesn't happen just within the shell? The shell presumably has the capability of doing so, but it's just not enabled??

And you presumably wouldn't want to have to issue the mount instructions every time the Pi was booted - again presumably there's some way of automating the mount instructions (eg in config.txt)??

[Jim Manley]

I'll be creating additional pages to address how to move all but the /boot OS directory from the SD card to one, or more, USB drives, how to manually and automatically back up user and OS files, and how to set up mounts so that they happen automatically for drive access from the command line.