How do you scan for all the disk drives on a system.

osiosi · 06-28-2006, 11:05 PM

I am a newbie on Linux, I need to know how do I scan for all the disk drives on a system, like on Sun we can run format and on HPUX we have ioscan. Is there a similar command on RedHat Linux.

Thanks

devhen · 06-28-2006, 11:22 PM

hmm... df will show you the mounted drives and their capacity/use. fdisk should do the rest for you.

gilead · 06-28-2006, 11:44 PM

fdisk -l or cat /proc/partitions should show you the list of known partitions.

osiosi · 06-29-2006, 10:22 AM

Actually I am more concerned about the disks which are on the system but they have not been partitioned or mounted, for example a brand new disk on the system but not used atall so how would a new SA would know if there is this disk sitting on the system not being utilized.

migantc1 · 06-29-2006, 11:04 AM

You can try running lvmdiskscan it will show you everthing lvm can see even the disk that are not being used.

osiosi · 06-29-2006, 12:12 PM

What about the disks that are not under LVM meaning not being partitioned or initialized.

devhen · 06-29-2006, 01:56 PM

try running fdisk on the usual devices. for example, if your system uses ATA try

Quote:

/sbin/fdisk /dev/hda
/sbin/fdisk /dev/hdb
/sbin/fdisk /dev/hdc

and so on. you'll get an 'unable to open dev/hdx' message if there is no drive present. another note: on more recent systems fdisk is in /sbin/ or /usr/sbin/ so simply 'fdisk' will give you an unknown command error. run the program as above, with the full path.

alternatively, if your system uses SATA your drives would most likely be at /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc, etc.

osiosi · 06-29-2006, 03:25 PM

thanks Devin. So there is no one command that could determine all the disks on a system, a new person really needs to search in the system for the disks.

thanks

avijitp · 06-30-2006, 12:10 AM

just run:

Quote:

/sbin/fdisk -l |grep Disk | awk '{print $2}'|awk -F\: '{print $1}'

This will show the drives attached to the running system.