LinuxQuestions.org - Finding another partition on another drive

I'm guessing it's IDE, otherwise the examples below would be a little different.

If you know what drive it is in the system (primary- / secondary- / -master / -slave), you can find it pretty easily. As root, run "fdisk -l /dev/hdX", replacing the X as follows...

primary-master = a
primary-slave = b
secondary-master = c
secondary-slave = d

So, if it's the primary-slave, the device is /dev/hdb. The fdisk -l command will list all partitions on the drive specified. My output on my Linux-only laptop is...

Code:

# fdisk -l /dev/hda



Disk /dev/hda: 60.0 GB, 60011642880 bytes

255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7296 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes



  Device Boot    Start      End    Blocks  Id  System

/dev/hda1  *        1        16    128488+  83  Linux

/dev/hda2            17      1321  10482412+  83  Linux

/dev/hda3          1322      1337    128520  82  Linux swap

/dev/hda4          1338      7296  47865667+  83  Linux

If it's the only Linux partition on the drive, it will stick out in the "System" column.

To find where it might be automagic'ly mounted, look in the file /etc/fstab. This will list all the partitions Linux knows about on your system. Let's pretend you found a Linux partition at /dev/hdb2 with the fdisk command. Then, you look for the entry in your fstab with that partition. It might look like...

Code:

/dev/hdb2 /mnt/storage ext3 defaults 1 2

The first column is the partition, the second is the mount-point. In this fake case, the partition is mounted as /mnt/storage. You could then see what was in that partition with "ls /mnt/storage".

<<EDIT>>

Almost forgot... If you don't find it listed in the fstab, then you will have to create a mount-point and manually mount the partition.

Code:

# mkdir /mnt/storage

# mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb4 /mnt/storage

# ls /mnt/storage

Copy over whatever you want to back-up, then unmount the partition with...

Code:

# umount /mnt/storage