You can mount an Android phone via USB (go to Settings -> ‘Wireless and networks’ ‘More settings’ -> ‘USB utilities’ -> ‘Connect storage to PC’, then mount as you would any other USB storage device) but that won’t work if you have an encrypted SD card - you’ll be able to see all files but their contents will be encrypted hence unusable.
To mount the phone and see the SD card’s contents decrypted, you’ll need to use MTP.
I initially followed the Gentoo MTPfs instructions and various other guides such as [How to] Connect your Android Ice Cream Sandwich Phone to Ubuntu for File Access that worked with mtpfs, but I kept getting the following error:
Transport endpoint is not connected
Also listing the mounted directory came back showing question marks:
bpc steph # ls -l /mnt
ls: cannot access /mnt/s2: Transport endpoint is not connected
total 0
?????????? ? ? ? ? ? s2
I ditched mtpfs. Simple MTPFS worked.
Simple MTPFS
emerge -av simple-mtpfs
It has media-libs/libmtp as a dependency. I got a problem with version 1.1.6-r1 (see media-libs/libmtp fails to compile (glibc-2.20?) so I masked it and used 1.1.8 instead.
Make a mount point:
mkdir /mnt/s2
Mount:
simple-mtpfs /mnt/s2
Unmount:
fusermount -u /mnt/s2
You could something like the following to /etc/fstab to use the normal mount command:
simple-mtpfs /mnt/s2 fuse noauto,noatime,sync,ro,users 0 0
Mount:
mount /mnt/s2
Unmount:
umount /mnt/s2
E.g.:
bpc steph # mount /mnt/s2
Unable to open ~/.mtpz-data for reading, MTPZ disabled.
Device 0 (VID=04e8 and PID=6860) is a Samsung Galaxy models (MTP).
bpc steph # ls -l /mnt/s2
total 0
drwxrwxr-x 2 root root 0 Jan 1 1970 Card
drwxrwxr-x 2 root root 0 Jan 1 1970 Phone
bpc steph # umount /mnt/s2
bpc steph # ls -l /mnt/s2
total 0
Gotchas
Unlock the phone
I found that the phone has to be unlocked before it will mount.
Only works as root
I couldn’t get this working for normal users, only root. Normal users get the following:
me@pc ~ $ mount /mnt/s2
Unable to open ~/.mtpz-data for reading, MTPZ disabled.
Device 0 (VID=04e8 and PID=6860) is a Samsung Galaxy models (MTP).
me@pc ~ $ ls -l /mnt/s2
total 0
me@pc ~ $ umount /mnt/s2
umount: /mnt/s2: not mounted
TODO: Get this working for normal users!
Phone contents empty
The last time I tried this, the Phone directory only contained empty directories - no files!
The contents of the Card directory was fine.
In the end I had to use MTP to get the contents of the (encrypted) SD card and USB to get the contents of the phone! All a bit of a mess really.
