Disks and Filesystems
df
|
Display available space on mounted filesystems. |
mount
|
Make a disk partition accessible. |
umount
|
Unmount a disk partition (make it inaccessible). |
fsck
|
Check a disk partition for errors. |
sync
|
Flush all disk caches to disk. |
Linux systems can have multiple disks or disk partitions. In casual conversation, these are variously called disks, partitions, filesystems, volumes, even directories. We’ll try to be more accurate.
A disk is a hardware device, which may be divided into partitions that act as independent storage devices. Partitions are represented on Linux systems as special files in (usually) the directory /dev. For example, /dev/sda7 could be a partition on your hard drive. Some common devices in /dev are:
hda |
First IDE bus, master device; partitions are hda1, hda2, ... |
hdb |
First IDE bus, slave device; partitions are hdb1, hdb2, ... |
hdc |
Second IDE bus, master device; partitions are hdc1, hdc2, ... |
hdd |
Second IDE bus, slave device; partitions are hdd1, hdd2, ... |
sda |
First block device, such as SCSI, SATA, USB, or Firewire hard drives; partitions are sda1, sda2, ... |
sdb |
Second block device; partitions are sdb1, sdb2, ... Likewise for sdc, sdd, ... |
ht0 |
First IDE tape drive (then ht1, ht2, ...) with auto-rewind |
nht0 |
First IDE tape drive (then nht1, nht2, ...) without auto-rewind |
st0 |
First SCSI tape drive (then st1, st2, ...) |
scd0 |
First SCSI CD-ROM drive (then scd1, scd2, ...) |
fd0 |
First floppy drive (then ... |
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