Hard drive device names
From MEPIS Documentation Wiki
!!! Warning! The info contained in this article pertains to older versions of MEPIS !!!
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About hard drives in Linux
Linux refers to your hard drive devices and partitions using a simple naming convention. These names are defined by the type of drive and where it is connected.
Parallel ATA (IDE)
Traditional Parallel ATA (PATA) drives, which were common in desktop systems until around 2006, are referred to in Simply Mepis versions prior to 7.0 as follows:
| Physical location | Device name |
|---|---|
| Primary master | hda |
| Primary slave | hdb |
| Secondary master | hdc |
| Secondary slave | hdd |
Other drive technologies
Other types of drives (including USB, Serial ATA, and SCSI) are referred to as sda, sdb, sdc, etc, depending on the order in which they are detected. Thus, if you have two SATA drives and a USB drive in your system, they are likely to be sda, sdb, and sdc respectively.
Partitions
Every drive needs a partition in order to store data. Even if the drive is formatted entirely to one file system, it will have one partition. Partitions on a drive are referred to as a number appended to the device name. So the first partition on drive hda is hda1, the second is hda2, etc.
Note that if you have an extended partition with logical drives, the extended partition uses a number, and then each logical drive uses a number. So if you have a drive divided into three primary partitions, and and extended partition with two logical drives, they would be:
| hda1 | first primary partition |
| hda2 | second primary partition |
| hda3 | third primary partition |
| hda4 | extended partition |
| hda5 | first logical partition |
| hda6 | second logical partition |
