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Linux Pocket Guide
book

Linux Pocket Guide

by Daniel J. Barrett
February 2004
Beginner content levelBeginner
200 pages
5h 40m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Linux Pocket Guide

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 /dev directory. For example, /dev/hda7 could be a partition on your master IDE disk. 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 SCSI device; partitions are sda1, sda2, …

sdb

Second SCSI 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 fd1, fd2, …), usually mounted on /mnt/floppy

Before a partition can hold files, it is “formatted” by writing a filesystem on it. A filesystem defines how files are ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596806347Errata Page