Manually Mounting A Thumb Drive In Linux

I wanted to access the contents of my Sidekick from a laptop running Damn Small Linux. I plugged in the appropriate USB cable to both the phone and the computer, and waited. Nothing happened. I had been spoiled by Windows, as I was waiting for a beep or something signifying that the device was detected (Perhaps I was also waiting for a paper clip to come out and do a little dance to entertain me while I waited for said device to be detected).

Apparently, I was out of practice. While, Linux can no doubt auto recognize and mount a thumb drive, a stripped down Linux box wasn't going to do that. Instead, I was going to have to do things the old fashion way.

The first step: search Google. I found two handy articles,here and here that told me everything I needed to know.

First, I ran the command lsusb and was greeted with:

   # lsusb
   Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000  
   Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0da0:1001 Danger Research 

Considering the Sidekick is made by Danger, this was a very good sign.

I then mounted this drive by doing:

   mkdir /mnt/thumb
   mount /dev/sda /mnt/thumb/

The surprising thing - this just totally worked. I could see the thumb drive just like any other directory on disk.