Linux - How to figure out what harddrives are attached?

Question

So I have a server that has a few harddrives in it, all formatted and mounted. However I'm told there is another drive attached to it. How do I find out what drives are attached? How do I find out the device filename for this new drive (that's not mounted)

Answer 1

fdisk -l

plus mandatory extra characters...

Answer 2

The sg_* utilities might also be useful:

$ sudo sg_map -i
/dev/sg0  /dev/sda  ATA       WDC WD5000BEVT-2  01.0
/dev/sg1  /dev/scd0  Optiarc   BD ROM BC-5500S   1.83
/dev/sg2  /dev/sdb  ATA       WDC WD5000BEVT-0  01.0
/dev/sg3  /dev/sdc  WD        PP III Studio II  0817

There are lots of other commands in the sg utilities such as sg_scan, sg_readcap and so on.

Also if you are booted from a redhat/centos cd you can switch to an alternate console and use the "list-harddrives" command to show disks attached to the system.

Answer 3

Depends on how the drive is attached.

ATA/SATA drives should normally be detected on bootup. Look into the boot log (/var/log/syslog, /var/log/messages, output of dmesg).

There should also be a list of recognized partitions for all partitioned drives under /proc/partitions.

For hotplugged drives (e.g. USB) it depends on how the distribution manages them. Usually modern distros use udev (older might use hotplug or hald). The log is configurable, either a separate log under /var/log, or in the general log messages or syslog).

Answer 4

fdisk -l

dmesg

/var/log/message..