partitioning - Mount a USB Drive Questions

I would appreciate someone interpret for me what the terminal run means. I've edited it for brevity.

1. I first ran "$ sudo fdisk -l ". Then I attempted to make a directory.


2. Then I attempted to make a mount point " $ sudo mkdir /media/USB ", which I tried previously, also, which might explain "File exists."


3. The I attempted to mount the USB drive, following a cookbook at http://sourcedigit.com/14779-mount-unmount-usb-pen-drive-ubuntu-terminal/ . The result said it was already mounted or busy. so...


4. I attempted to unmount it, if that were the problem "$ sudo umount /dev/sdd "


5. Then I repeated the make directory and mount commands. It again told me it was already mounted or busy.



6. I then finished by attempting to leave it in a unmounted state.

gparted then gave me me a dropdown box: /dev/sdd (7.5 GiB)
The green box portion above the partitions says " /dev/sdd2 7.5 GiB "
The partition portion of gparted has three lines.
The first is: "/dev/sdd1 (exclamation point) File system (black square) unknown Size 31.50 KiB
The second is: unallocated , File System grey square Size 1.97 KiB
The final line is: /dev/sdd2 key symbol File system (green square) fat32 Mount Point /media//1D7E-DAFB Size 7.5 GiB Used 14.99 MiB Unused 7.48 GiB

Am I in error attempting to mount /dev/sdd ? Should it be one of the partitions?

Am I in error attempting to mount /dev/sdd ? Should it be one of the partitions?

Yes, your drive sdd (like most drives) is partitioned. Unpartitioned drives do exist, but aren't very common, and make things harder to change/move in the future.

PS. there are good GUI's for this stuff, like Disks / gnome-disk-utility, try it instead. Or lsblk is handy too.