EXPLAIN: Hard Drive Partition Names: HDA1/HDA2, etc.
Unlike Windows, which uses letters to designate drives and drive partitions, GNU/Linux uses terms to name drives and partitions.
Hard drives are named hd(x) where (x) is a letter starting with ‘a’.
The first hard drive on your system will be named hda. The first partition of the first hard drive will be named hda1, the second partition will be named hda2, the third hda3 and so on.
The second hard drive on your system, if present, will be namd hdb. The first partition of the second hard drive will be named hdb1, the second hdb2, and so on.
The same convention follows for the following types of drives:
- Floppy drives: the first will be named fd0, the second fd1, and so on.
- SCSI drives: the first SCSI drive will be named sda. The first partition on that drive will be sda1, the second sda2, and so on. Note that on my Debian systems, my USB stick is also named with this convention.
- CDRoms follow the same convention as hard disks. My CDRom is named hdc.
Note that this naming convention is different from mounting the drive. You cannot access the data on a drive by its device name. Mounting is described in another article coming shortly.
Similiarly sata drives are labelled sd[x]
Sweet – thanks!
Why do floppy drives begin with “0″ while the others start with “1?”
I’m sure I saw hda0 somewhere (during boot, maybe?).
On that note, where do I look to find all that text that passes along the screen during boot?
I’ve never seen a hda0, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. I noticed as well that the floppy drives end with 0’s and the hdd’s end with >0. I’ve never looked into it, but you can bet I will now!
I think the command ‘dmesg’ is what you’re looking for to see the boot up info.
You may want to ‘man dmesg’ to see what parameters you can use to get more information out of it. I’ve never really used it, but you’ve given me another thing to look into
Thanks!