Hello, *** WARNING: Long message containing examples *** On Mon, 29 Oct 2001, Michael Arolan wrote: > How can I see all the partitions on my hard disk whether mounted by Linux or > not? First determine which hard drives you have. If you have IDE drives, then the Primary Master drive is called /dev/hda, and the slave is called /dev/hdb. The Secondary Master is /dev/hdc, and slave is /dev/hdd. If you have SSI drives they'll be called /dev/sda, /dev/sdb etc according to their SCSI IDs and location on the SCSI chain. You can use the 'dmesg' command to see if Linux sees your drives. Grep for your drive name. For example, to look for /dev/hda, do this: % dmesg|grep hda ide0: BM-DMA at 0xd800-0xd807, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA hda: Maxtor 98196H8, ATA DISK drive hda: 160086528 sectors (81964 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=9964/255/63, UDMA(66) hda: hda1 < hda5 hda6 hda7 hda8 hda9 hda10 hda11 hda12 > hda2 Let me explain what an Extended partition is. You can only have four primary partitions on an IDE drive (well, under Linux anyway). But sometimes you want more partitions than just four (in fact I always do!) The solution to that is an Extended PArtition. You create a large 'Extended' partitions, and then you create little partitions inside of THAT partition. These are called Logical partitions. The last line of my dmesg output is informative of this; it tells you what partitions are on that drive. You can see that /dev/hda1 is an extended partition containing /dev/hda5 - /dev/hda12, and that /dev/hda2 is a primary partition. It doesn't obviously state that information, but you can then is use the fdisk command to see partition information for that drive: % fdisk -l /dev/hda Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 9964 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hda1 1 7833 62918541 5 Extended /dev/hda2 * 7834 9964 17117257+ c Win95 FAT32 (LBA) /dev/hda5 1 17 136489+ 83 Linux /dev/hda6 18 50 265041 82 Linux swap /dev/hda7 51 83 265041 82 Linux swap /dev/hda8 84 214 1052226 83 Linux /dev/hda9 215 345 1052226 83 Linux /dev/hda10 346 998 5245191 83 Linux /dev/hda11 999 2304 10490413+ 83 Linux /dev/hda12 2305 7833 44411661 83 Linux You can use the output from the 'df' command to see which partitions are mounted and which aren't. HTH, -Yaron --