Linux® Desk Reference, Second Edition

Introduction

The Linux concept of a disk is not particularly intuitive. First, a single physical disk may contain several disk devices (e.g., /dev/hda1, /dev/hda2, etc.). Second, it is fairly rare to deal with disks directly in the course of day-to-day operations. Once a disk has been defined, you usually must put a filesystem on it in order to get any use out of it (see Chapter 11 for more information on the creation and maintenance of filesystems).

Those of you who've been reading these introductory sections have probably noticed a common theme by now: Linux does not care about the name of a particular resource; it is usually much more interested in what the resource's number is. Disks are no exception. All Linux devices have two numbers associated ...