Many thanks for taking the time to explain that for me. Linux is
requiring a paradigm shift for me to be able to move beyond simply
installing it on my box and that sort of explanation is quite helpful.
KDE presents my drives in much the same way as Windows - although I
assume on KDE this does not extend any deeper than the level of the
interface itself?
Deane
Michael JasonSmith wrote:
On Mon, 2005-05-30 at 08:10 +1200, Deane Foreman wrote:
Hard drives? Yes, I looked in >Places - Computer< on Gnome (there is an
icon for Floppy, CD ROM, File System, Network Places - but no hard
drives) and everywhere else on the deskop. I also looked in the manual
and did a lot of searching on Google using a lot of different words,
looked on Linux newbie sites etc...before posting to the list.
:) Deep breath, we are about to examine one of the big differences
between Unix (including Linux) and Windows.
Windows, following the lead of DOS, shows drives [1] as individual hard
drives. Like all drives, they are named by a single letter, with the
first hard-drive traditionally called "C:". But you knew this already,
that is why you are looking for them :)
The Unix systems, including Linux, take a different route. Instead of
presenting individual drives to the user, they merge *all* the folders
on *all* the drives into a single tree. This is what GNOME calls "File
System". The reason that Unix does this is that it rarely matters
exactly where the data is stored [2]. When it is important, such as
removable media, GNOME normally gives you an icon for the drive (Floppy,
CD ROM, USB Drive…).
To answer your question, you will have to work from the command-line as
I do not know of any GUI application that will tell you this
information.
1. Start a "terminal": Applications -> System Tools -> Terminal.
2. In the terminal type "mount".
The terminal will list which parts of the File System tree are located
on which drive, as well as some other information. For example, the
following is the output for my system.
/dev/hda2 on / type ext3 (rw)
none on /proc type proc (rw)
none on /sys type sysfs (rw)
none on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
usbfs on /proc/bus/usb type usbfs (rw)
/dev/hda1 on /boot type ext3 (rw)
none on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
/dev/hda5 on /public type ext3 (rw)
All the lines we care about start with "/dev/hd"
/dev/hda2 on / type ext3 (rw)
/dev/hda1 on /boot type ext3 (rw)
/dev/hda5 on /public type ext3 (rw)
"dev" is the folder that lists all the "devices", the raw hardware like
keyboards, video cards and drives. Instead of being named after letters,
drives in Linux are known by a code:
hd for an IDE hard-disk (sd for a SCSI disk),
a, b, c... for each drive, and
1, 2, 3... for each partition.
So, by looking at the above output from "mount", we see that I have one
IDE hard-disk, called "hda" (hard-disk a). It is split into three
partitions:
* hda1 contains the /boot folder ("/dev/hda1 on /boot"),
* hda5 contains the /public folder ("/dev/hda5 on /public"), and
* hda2 contains everything else ("/dev/hda2" on /").
(There are other partitions, but they are not used for file storage.)
However, I suspect you are asking the question because you are wondering
where all your Windows files are kept…
[1] I really should call the drives "persistent storage media", because
not drives have disks or discs in them. However, for brevity I will
call them drives :)
[2] This allows the system administrators to add drives, move the real
locations of data around, and generally muck with the system
without normal everyday people having to worry about it. For
example, can buy a drive to store all the users' data, move all
the existing data onto the new drive, and then set the new drive
to be the new "/home" folder without anyone noticing!
