[PLUG] Finding and mounting a second SATA drive

Richard C. Steffens rsteff at comcast.net
Fri Apr 6 16:07:22 UTC 2012


When my wife walked into her home office this morning she was greeted 
with an acrid smell and found that her computer was not running. We're 
guessing power supply, but will let the folks at Pacific Solutions make 
sure it's not something in addition to that.

While I have convinced her to do backups, she does not do them as often 
as I think she should. Knowing that her machine might have to sit with 
Pacific Solutions for more than today I offered to pop her drive into my 
USB drive box and get a few files for her. I opened up her machine and 
found a SATA drive. My drive box is for IDE drives. Sigh.

Next, I remembered that my "new" desktop also has a SATA drive. I 
powered down, opened up, connected her drive to a spare SATA connector 
on the mother board, plugged in the drive power and rebooted.

Now for the real problem: How do I find that second drive? I did a bit 
of Googling and found fdisk -l. But that only shows my drive:

$ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0007d83e

    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1       59628   478959616   83  Linux
/dev/sda2           59628       60802     9424897    5  Extended
/dev/sda5           59628       60802     9424896   82  Linux swap / Solaris

I didn't find /dev/sdb or anything similar.

This is now an educational exercise since I put her drive back in her 
machine and she has taken it to Pacific Solutions, but I'd still like to 
know what I'm missing in case the issue arises again.

-- 
Regards,

Dick Steffens





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