Gfilui

Strangely there is no existing Q&A in Ask Ubuntu (AU) on this question:

"How do you manually mount a partition?"

There are many on automatically mounting or problems encountered during mounting that I've read here. But none on how to manually mount a partition.

This self-answered question is to share information from other websites here in AU.

The first step is to list all your partitions to find the one you want to mount:

$ lsblk -o NAME,FSTYPE,LABEL,SIZE,MOUNTPOINT
NAME FSTYPE LABEL SIZE MOUNTPOINT
sdb 14.4G 
├─sdb4 iso9660 Ubuntu 18.04 LTS amd64 1.4G /media/rick/Ubuntu 18.04 LTS amd64
├─sdb2 1M 
├─sdb5 ext4 casper-rw 6.4G /media/rick/casper-rw
├─sdb3 vfat usbboot 244M 
└─sdb1 ntfs usbdata 6.4G /media/rick/usbdata
sr0 1024M 
sda 931.5G 
├─sda4 ntfs WINRETOOLS 450M 
├─sda2 128M 
├─sda5 ntfs Image 11.4G 
├─sda3 ntfs HGST_Win10 919G /mnt/d
└─sda1 vfat ESP 500M 
nvme0n1 477G 
├─nvme0n1p5 ext4 NVMe_Ubuntu_16.0 44.6G /
├─nvme0n1p3 16M 
├─nvme0n1p1 ntfs 450M 
├─nvme0n1p8 ext4 Ubuntu18.04 23.7G 
├─nvme0n1p6 swap Linux Swap 7.9G [SWAP]
├─nvme0n1p4 ntfs NVMe_Win10 391.2G /mnt/c
├─nvme0n1p2 vfat 99M /boot/efi
└─nvme0n1p7 ntfs Shared_WSL+Linux 9G /mnt/e

For this example, we will mount nvme0n1p8 which has the label Ubuntu18.04. To credit sources, we'll be following this article as a
guide.

Create mount point directory

The next step is to create a directory under /mnt that the newly mounted partition will be referred to as:

sudo mkdir /mnt/Ubuntu18.04

Mount the partition to the new directory

The final step is to mount the partition to the new directory:

$ sudo mount -t auto -v /dev/nvme0n1p8 /mnt/Ubuntu18.04
/dev/nvme0n1p8 mounted on /mnt/Ubuntu18.04.

Notice we prepend /dev/ to the names provided by lsblk above.

Now let's see what we've just mounted:

$ ll /mnt/Ubuntu18.04
total 24
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Apr 26 17:00 ./
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 Apr 27 20:51 ../
drwx------ 2 root root 16384 Apr 26 17:00 lost+found/

lost_found is needed for fschk command (File System check). It is automatically created and normally we don't have to "fiddle" with it.

Unmount the partition

When we are finished we can unmount the partition using the -l parameter which safely unmounts the partition:

$ sudo umount /dev/nvme0n1p8 -l