Brand new to Linux and I cannot access a USB flash drive - please help!

[Moltke]

I'm using Linux for the first time just as something to play around with on a secondary laptop I own.  Today, I plugged in a flash drive, and I figured out how to use the disk manager to view the contents and reformat it with a partition using the Linux internal disk file format (Ext4).  However...I can't access the damned thing!  I saw that the drive displayed on my desktop, so tried to mount it, but I'm being told that I do not have permission to do that.  How can I give myself permission to mount removable USB drives like this and write files to it??  (Disclaimer: I know what Terminal is but I do not know any commands. I'll happily type one if you give it to me, though).

If I understand correctly, you plugged the USB in and formatted to ext4? To mount any disk on Linux you either have to be root or use the sudo command

Code:

sudo mount /dev/sdx #replace X with the appropiate i.e /sda

type your password when asked and  that's it. To check that the disk/partition has been mounted correctly type in a terminal

Code:

lsblk

which will list disks/partitions information. I think you might want to reformat the device and this time select fat32 instead of ext4 since the former is the default for USB devices, that should fix the issue so you can mount/open and access its contents.

Hope this helps!