I'm thinking about writing a script that lists all of the hard drives that are installed on any given system and parsing through dmesg's output is a bit of a pain. lshw seems to work pretty good but it doesn't list the drives in my old Compaq DL360 so I don't know how much it can be relied on.

The closest thing I think that I can find is /proc/diskstats but does anyone know if there's any other way (via command line) to get a list of a system's hard drives? I would imagine that it's something fairly accessible since GUI tools like KDE's systemsettings seems to do a pretty good job of it.

Thanks!

I like 'fdisk -l'. It'll actually show all the partitions, but it'd be trivial to parse out whatever you need.

That's true. I'm no scripting wizard, but I guess you could do a blind

for d in h s ; do
for i in a b c d ; do
echo "running fdisk -l ${d}d${i}"
fdisk -l /dev/${d}d${i}
done
done

But that doesn't take into account some devices like /dev/ida/cXdX the one on my old DL360 or who knows what else that's out there that don't fall into the standard /dev/sdX or /dev/hdX device file format. I was hoping that there'd be some "uber" system file that would have all of the disk info. Is there really not?

Actually, fdisk -l with no arguments displays information for ALL known drives. You can also look in /proc/partitions.

for fdisk -l you can do:

Hi guys,

I'm working on some DL360's running Redhat, and fdisk -l doesn't output anything.

I need that output in case I need to replace and restore the disks.

Do you guys know how I can get it working or how I can get around this not working?

Thanks in anticipation.

Stin

1. Run it as root.
2. Don't resurrect a dead thread for a mostly unrelated problem: start a new one instead.

Thanks for the reply.

1.
If I run fdisk -l as non-root user i get: "Command not found"
If I run fdisk -l as root I get nothing. Just returns me to the prompt with no output.

2.
The people in this thread are using the same hardware as me, the same OS as me, and have fdisk working for them. I thought they might be in the best position to help me out.

Weird. Try /sbin/fdisk -l.

What does locate fdisk turn up?
It's still almost 2 years ago.

/sbin/fdisk does the same. No output and returns me to a prompt.

OOPS! I didn't see the age. I was just happy to see that people could do what I was trying to do on the hardware I have.

I haven't used locate before, and this is a live system so I dont want to risk it. I'll see if I can run it on the lab one.
man locate shows me about the slocate command. It sounds OK to use, but like I said, I'm currently connected in a production environment.

btw. Here is the output of df -k

[luser@host bin]$ cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Linux release 6.2 (Zoot)

[linus@hmpc01 bin]$ df -k
Filesystem..............1k-blocks....Used.....Available...Use%.Mounted on
/dev/ida/c0d0p6.........130361.......62983....60647.......51%../
/dev/ida/c0d0p1.........130377.......2508.....121137......2%.../boot
/dev/ida/c0d0p8.........5944744......4456824..1187840.....79%../in
/dev/ida/c0d0p5.........2353640......1352648...879412.....61%../usr

Excuse the ...'s. I dont think these forums handle white space very well.

Sorry double post.

No biggie, we've all been there Probaby a wise choice.I've not seen that sort of /dev structure before - is this becuse it's a 6.2 install of RedHat? Use [code][/code] tags to preserve formatting.

Thank you very much for your time and patience.

I think it is like that because it is compaq scsi.

I've found this thread but its a bit above my ability right now:

http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=24895

I think they are saying it could be a kernel bug.

Yeah, doesn't look promising.

Do you see any of the messages they mention in either /var/log/messages or the output of dmesg? Things like:

I tailed the /var/log/messages file and then tried the fdisk command in another window, and it had no effect on the log.
The ouput of dmesg wasnt very helpful, but this seems a step closer to what I need.

I just want to know how to translate this into what I need from fdisk -l


[root@rpc1 /proc]# more partitions
[root@rpc1 /proc]# exit