How Do I Determine How Many Disk Drives I Have in My Linux Machine?

Linux is an excellent development and software "hacking" platform.

Linux is a free, Unix-type operating system that can be downloaded and installed as a "distribution" that is configured with graphical and command line administration utilities specific to that distribution. However, there are also administration utilities common to nearly all flavors of Linux that can be used to find the number of disk drives in a computer. Use the "fdisk" command line tool to find the number of disk drives installed on your Linux computer.

Things You'll Need

• Root or administrator account password

Instructions

1. Unplug all USB drives from the computer.

2. Click the "Start" or "Menu" button on the Linux computer desktop (commonly represented by a button with the picture of a foot, penguin, gear, "F" or the word "Start") and click "System, "System Tools" or "Accessories." Click the "Terminal" icon in the menu that appears.

3. Type "su" at the command prompt and press the "Enter" key. Type the password of the "root" account or the password of an administrator account when prompted on the command line and press the "Enter" key.

4. Type "fdisk -l" at the command prompt and press the "Enter" key. The name of each drive device will display in the command line output with a list of the drive partitions below each drive.

References

• The Unofficial Fedora FAQ; The Fedora Basics FAQ; Max Kanat-Alexander
• Die: Fdisk(8) -- Linux Man Page