[2008-08-24]
Depending on what drivers are used even IDE hard disks are displayed as sda, etc. Use the following to see the names of the hard disks
$ ls /dev|grep '[s|h]d[a-z]'
[from http://linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/6472/1/]
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There are lots of excellent complete articles by experts on the web – which can be found by doing a search with terms like – linux hard drive install partition
Basic steps
- ls /proc/ide => will show the available hard disks currently on the system
- connect the new hard disk
- its important to know where and how its connected (IDE primary, secondary, master, slave, etc), knowing this will let you know how to locate the file used to indicate your new hard disk
- IDE disks
- hda – Master on primary interface on 1st IDE controller
- hdb – Slave on primary interface on 1st IDE controller
- hdc – Master on secondar interface on 1st IDE controller
- hdd -Slave on secondary interface on 1st IDE controller
- IDE disks
- check if the drive is seen
- mount the partitions in the drive
- Access the contents
In Linux all devices are mounted as folders. Folders /dev and /proc are some of the key folders.
# ls /dev/hd* => will list the disk names in the system
# ls /proc/ide – can be used to see the list of ide drives available to the system
ide ide exists on systems with the ide bus. There are directories for each ide channel and attached device. Files include: cache buffer size in KB capacity number of sectors driver driver version geometry physical and logical geometry identify in hexidecimal media media type model manufacturer's model number settings drive settings smart_thresholds in hexidecimal smart_values in hexidecimal The hdparm(8) utility provides access to this information in a friendly format.
tools, utilities:
- fdisk – partition management
- #fdisk -l /dev/hda =>lists the partitions on first disk
- df – file system disk free space
- du – disk usage
One of the links that I used was http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/4232/1/
