29.2 Finding the New Hard Drive

This tutorial assumes that a new physical or virtual hard drive has been installed on the system and is visible to the operating system. Once added, the new drive should automatically be detected by the operating system. Typically, the disk drives in a system are assigned device names beginning hd or sd followed by a letter to indicate the device number. For example, the first device might be /dev/sda, the second /dev/sdb and so on.

The following is output from a system with only one disk drive connected to a SATA controller:

# ls /dev/sd*

/dev/sda /dev/sda1 /dev/sda2

This shows that the disk drive represented by /dev/sda is itself divided into 2 partitions, represented by /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2.

The following output is from the same system after a second hard disk drive has been installed:

# ls /dev/sd*

/dev/sda /dev/sda1 /dev/sda2 /dev/sdb

As shown above, the new hard drive has been assigned to the device file /dev/sdb...