how can i find out what kind of hard drive i have?

slinky2004 · 11-03-2005, 07:11 PM

i'm currently seeing some wierd error messages about my hard drive in dmesg and some googling as lead me to the conclusion that i might need to enable some sata drivers or something. "hdparm -i /dev/hda" and "hdparm /dev/hda" will give me some info on my hd, but i need to find out if it's an ata, sata, pata, ide, scsi, etc. type drive. ide and scsi are types of controllers that manage the drive, right? so ata, pata, and sata are the kinds of hard drives? if anybody can help me with this, i'd appreciate it.

perfect_circle · 11-03-2005, 07:39 PM

Code:

skalkoto@darkstar:~$ dmesg |grep "hda:"
    ide0: BM-DMA at 0xe800-0xe807, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA
hda: Maxtor 6B200P0, ATA DISK drive
hda: max request size: 1024KiB
hda: 398297088 sectors (203928 MB) w/8192KiB Cache, CHS=24792/255/63, UDMA(133)
hda: cache flushes supported
 hda: hda1 hda3 < hda5 hda6 hda7 hda8 >

slinky2004 · 11-03-2005, 09:09 PM

so, dmesg is the only place i can find this out? thats kinda wierd. doesn't dmesg just report that based on the drivers and such that i'm using? so if i have an ata drive and i'm using a sata driver, dmesg would just say i have a sata drive, right?

michaelk · 11-04-2005, 07:45 AM

So what type of PC do you have?
Do you know any of its hardware specifications?
What are the wierd error messages you are seeing?
What distribution / version are you running?

The output of the command lscpi will show what type of controllers are installed in the PC.

IDE, ATA, and PATA are really the same thing and the drives have a device ID like /dev/hda, /dev/hdb etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integra..._ATA_Interface

SCSI, SATA, USB and Firewire have a device ID like /dev/sda, /dev/sdb etc.

You would only need a SATA driver if using a SATA controller. The driver be it IDE or SATA should read the information (Maxtor 6B200P0, ATA DISK drive) from the drive itself.