Here’s how to mount a USB hard disk drive (ie; external storage) on a Linux server, through the command line.
First, attach the hard disk and turn it on. Then look in /var/log/messages for a message similar to the ones shown in bold. This will tell you the device-location of your recently attached hdd.
server#: tail -f /var/log/messages -n 25 -- MARK -- kernel: usb 4-1: new high speed USB device using ... kernel: usb 4-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice kernel: scsi9 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices kernel: SCSI device sde: 586072368 512-byte hdwr sectors (xx MB) kernel: sde: Write Protect is off kernel: SCSI device sde: 586072368 512-byte hdwr sectors (xx MB) kernel: sde: Write Protect is off kernel: sde: sde1 kernel: sd 9:0:0:0: Attached scsi disk sde -- MARK --
The external storage can be found in /dev/sde1, as shown in the message-log (the last lines).
Make a new directory, and mount the device to that point.
# mkdir /mnt/usb-storage # mount /dev/sde1 /mnt/usb-storage
And now you can navigate to /mnt/usb-storage and find your content of the external storage