Where is your hard disk?

To know which file represents your hard disk; you need to run the command lsblk, which is short for list block:

elliot@ubuntu-linux:~$ lsblk
NAME   MAJ:MIN  RM SIZE RO  TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda      8:0     0  20G  0  disk
| sda1   8:1     0  20G  0  part /
sr0      11:0    1 1024M 0  rom

From the output, I can see that the name of my hard disk device is sda, which is short for SCSI Disk A. Now you need to understand that depending on the type of your hard disk drive, you may get a different name. Figure 1 summarizes Linux naming strategies for different types of hard drives:

Figure 1: Hard disk naming in Linux

So from the output of the lsblk command, you can conclude that I only have one disk (sda) on my virtual machine. Now we don't want to play with this disk as it contains the root filesystem, so let's add another disk to our virtual machine for learning purposes.