In my previous posts I’d written on how to mount your partitions using the mount command. In the post I’d mentioned that you’d have to mention the partition that you want to mount by specifying /dev/device_name as part of the command. The question that would come to your mind is, How do I know which of my partition is on what device? So let me show how to find out which partition is on what device! Like quite a lot of my posts, this involves the Command prompt - my preferred way of doing. Open the Terminal. Switch to root user by typing
su root. For those distros whose root accounts are disabled(Like Ubuntu) just prefix sudo. Type fdisk -l This is what you’ll get
[root@shaman]# fdisk -l`
Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0004ed56
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 10 80293+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 * 11 15091 121135645+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda3 15091 17455 18991317 8e Linux LVM
/dev/sda4 17456 19456 16073032+ f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5 17456 19456 16073001 7 HPFS/NTFS
The ones to note are Device, and System, the others can be ignored. Device indicates which device the particular filesystem is available at, and System indicates the filesystem type. In my case, /dev/sda1 is a Linux boot partition. My First Windows/NTFS drive(ie, Drive C) is available on /dev/sda2. /dev/sda3 is my Linux partition[configured as a LVM, will cover LVM on a future article] and my second NTFS partition is on /dev/sda4. So now I know which partition is available where, and I can go ahead with mounting.
