Ok guys, I am a little confused about the /dev section. I need to know how to determine what corresponds to what under /dev.

I had a sandisk cruzer usb device and I saw it listed in /proc/usb and wondered how would I have determined that it was supposed to be sda1 to begin with? I noticed that the drivers section under /proc/usb/drivers said it was using the transparent-scsi access method/driver. There are probably hundreds of entries in /dev.

Is there a naming scheme to the stuff in /dev that people know and use or is there a way to get your system to tell you what hardware you have goes to what entry in /dev ???

I guessed that transparent-scsi meant it would show up as a scsi drive so I tried sda1 and it worked, but what if it was something else? How can you tell what /dev listings are mountable? How can you tell the ones that actually represent something that is plugged in and ready to go vs the ones sitting there that do nothing because there is no corresponding hardware to mount????


Thanks in advance.


-Ice-

Thank God for devfs! Under the standard setup, there will be lots of entries in /dev, and most of them will be for devices that could exist. When using devfs, however, only the devices that are actually available are shown - it's very handy!

Anyway, with regard to mounting, if you issue the command fdisk -l, it should list all block devices that actually exist, so you should be able to determine which ones are mountable.

HTH

Also, sometimes by reading either dmesg or /var/log/messages you can determine what /dev each disk corresponds to, but not always. I have a success rate of oh, maybe 30% using that, otherwise it's a lucky guess or a quick search on here

Cool

Thanks for the responses. This was something I always wondered about.