How do I know which /dev/something alias my flash drive can be found under?

jddancks · 10-04-2013, 10:34 PM

This is something that has been bothering me. Most systems are nice enough to handle the mounting without you having to ask about it. When I tried this for the first time, I saw something briefly show up: "sda: sda1" so I assume /dev/sda1. So even though it didn't mount for me it gave me enough info on plugging in that I could figure the rest out. Because it was verbose. What about on systems where this isn't true, where you literally have to dig for info? How would you even do this?

astrogeek · 10-04-2013, 11:10 PM

I think looking at dmesg would work on most any distro. You might need to do that as root, or give your user sudo permission.

Just plug it in then...

Code:

tail dmesg

That should show where it is.

----

I initially thought you were talking about a pendrive, but for a drive present at boot try...

Code:

dmesg |grep 'dev/sd'

...which will show all detected sata/scsi devices.

syg00 · 10-04-2013, 11:28 PM

Code:

lsblk
fdisk -l
parted -l

Edit: again you may require root/sudo for the latter two.

Ztcoracat · 10-05-2013, 12:15 AM

The parted -l (small letter L) command ran as "root" is very helpful.

The output showed me all of my partitions on dev/sda1 with details.
I (think) on my system (because I only have one HDD) dev/sdb1 was my flash drive-

Thank you;syg00-

Madhu Desai · 10-05-2013, 10:58 AM

Code:

$ lsscsi
[0:0:0:0]    disk    ATA      ST31000524AS     JC45  /dev/sda 
[1:0:1:0]    disk    ATA      Maxtor 6Y250P0   YAR4  /dev/sdb 
[2:0:0:0]    disk    Sony     Storage Media    0100  /dev/sdc