Need info about file system

[tanishq4u]

Hi,
I am new to linux. I was familiour with windows xp. Normally in windows C,D like this drives will be there. so we know where we are storing data. Its easy to retrive also. Here in linux there is no c, D dirves. where we have to create folder. where we have store data. how can we know? how to open particualr path from terminal. I dont know terminal exactly but i thougt its same like command prompt in windows. so plz any one can help me regarding this issue.

[SagaciousKJB]

Well, everything in linux is stored under what is called "root". You can go to the top of this directory tree by typing "cd /" in your terminal.

Within this directory, there is usually a another directory called "media" or "mnt" that contains furder directories. Probably something like, "hd*" where * is a-z or "sd*" with the same rules applying.

If you're using ATA hard-drives, your master on your first drive should be in either /media/hda1 or /mnt/hda1 and your slave would be hdb1. If you have another drive, it will probably be hdb, but it could be anything so long as it's after a at this point. With SCSI or SATA you will probably see "sd*" where once again * is a-z, and then a number for the drive.

An example of mine

sagacious@amd:/$ ls /media/
cdrom  cdrom0  extern  floppy  floppy0  fuse  hdc1  iso  MediaOne  sda1  server  server2

hdc1 is my ATA surplus hard-drive, sdc is mounted by root so it doesn't show up here. sda1 is my SATA data drive. The rest of the drives are miscellanous and self-explanitory.

Try looking at your /etc/fstab file to give you a hint about which of your hard-drives show up in which directories...

They will typically be written like this

/dev/somedrive /directory that it is mounted in

A really good command you can use to figure out which drive is which, and where it is mounted, is "df -h"

I get an output like this

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdc1              53G  5.8G   45G  12% /
/dev/sda1             453G  393G   38G  92% /home
/dev/sde1             234G   57G  177G  25% /media/extern
/dev/sdb1              74G   69G  1.1G  99% /media/hdc1

This way you can see which /dev/* device corresponds to your hard-drive bey its size, and then see where under / it is mounted. Not to mention it also supplies you with vital information on disk usage.

Hope this helped.

[sica07]

I wrote a short tutorial here. I hope it helps you.