Accessing the flash drive on with the Pi

When you put flash drive we just prepared in your dev computer, it probably pops up ready to read in your file manager. The Raspberry Pi won’t do that automatically, so we need to set that up.

Plugging it in

Let’s start by plugging the flash drive into one of the USB ports on the Pi. On a Raspberry Pi 5, only two blue USB (type A) ports support the faster USB-3. Providing you have a modern flash drive that supports it, you want to put it in one of those.

All the commands for this page are run on the command line while logged into the Raspberry Pi. So, first log in using ssh lores.local (or whatever your hostname is).

Setting up auto-mounting

We don’t just want to mount our flash drive once, we want it to automatically mount even if the Raspberry Pi resets. We’ll do that by adding an entry for the flash drive to the fstab file, which controls automatic mounting.

Creating the mount point

You need to create a folder for the flash drive to be mounted at, let’s do that with:

sudo mkdir /mnt/zims

Editing the fstab file

We’re going to use the nano text editor to edit this file, and also we need super user access to do this, so we’re going to use the sudo command.

sudo nano /etc/fstab

Add the following line to the end of the file, noting that the LABEL=zims matches the volume label we chose when we prepared the drive.

LABEL=zims /mnt/zims ext4    defaults        0 0

Trying the mount

This should work automatically when the Pi is reset, but an easier way to try it out now is to run:

sudo mount -a

Don’t worry if you get "(hint) your fstab has been modified, but systemd still uses the old version)". Providing there are no other errors, you should be good to go. You can check if your files are there using:

sudo ls /mnt/zims

You should see a list of all those zim files you put on the flash drive. If you want to be extra sure it’s going to stay working, you could try rebooting the Pi (sudo reboot) and then login and run that sudo ls /mnt/zims command again and it will still work.

We also don’t really want to have to be the root user to see those zim files, so let’s make them readable by everyone by running:

sudo chmod -R a+rx /mnt/zims

Ok, we’ve got everything ready to serve up Wikipedia now, let’s wire it all together in the next step.