4 Ways to Show all Drives (Mounted and Unmounted) on Linux
The drives on any system can either be mounted or unmounted. The mounted drives are the ones that are ready to be accessed at any time whereas the data residing on the unmounted drives can only be accessed after these drives are mounted. In the proceeding section of this article, we want to share with you the different methods of displaying all available drives on Linux.
Display all Drives on Linux
To display all of your drives on a Linux system, you can perform any of the following four methods:
Method # 1: Using the “fdisk” Command
The “fdisk” command can be used to display the drives in Linux in the manner shown below:
The output produced by this command is shown in the following image:
Method # 2: Using the “blkid” Command:
The “blkid” command can be used to display available drives in Linux in the manner shown below:
The output produced by this command is shown in the following image:
Method # 3: Using the “lsblk” Command:
The “lsblk” command can be used to display the system drives in Linux in the manner shown below:
The output produced by this command is shown in the following image:
Method # 4: Using the “parted” Command:
The “parted” command can be used to display the disk partitions in Linux in the manner shown below:
The output produced by this command is shown in the following image:
Conclusion
By picking out any of the four methods shared in this article, you can conveniently find out all the mounted and unmounted drives on your Ubuntu system. Once you have this information, you can always mount a drive out of these whenever you wish to access its contents.
How do I view all available HDD's/partitions?
I found a 6 GB IDE HDD in my basement. I want to plug it in and see what might be on it. The drive seems to be recognized in BIOS.
I can’t find it in Ubuntu to view files, and Ubuntu is the only OS on that particular computer. I was wondering if Ubuntu has an equivalent to the Windows feature «My Computer», which lists all available drives/storage devices. Typically, My Computer shows C:, which can be opened to view all of your directories and files. At this point, it is very similar to Ubuntu’s Home Folder.
How to view/select all available partitions of that drive or all available HDD’s without formatting or tampering with the contents in any way?
How to List Mounted Drives on Linux
In this tutorial, I will show you the different ways to list mounted drives on Linux. We can use mount, findmnt, and df commands to list mounted device any Linux distribution like Ubuntu or Centos.
In Linux, mount command mounts a storage device or filesystem, and let’s go through commands that can display all those mounts.
1. Listing from /proc using cat command
To list mount points you can read contents of the file /proc/mounts.
In the following example, I have used cat command to read the /proc/mounts file:
2. Using Mount Command
You can use mount command to list mount points. When you run mount command without any options it will list mount points.
3. Using df command
You can use df command to list mount points.
The following command shows the output of df with -aTh option:
You can use -t followed by filesystem type (say ext3, ext4, nfs) to display respective mount points. For examples below df command display all NFS mount points.
4. Using findmnt
Findmnt is a powerful tool to find mounted filesystems. This command comes with lots of options to list mount filesystems.
The following command print all mounted filesystems:
Print mount point by specific filesystem type:
Search and list fstab contents:
Display all /etc/fstab file and converts LABEL= and UUID= tags to the real device names:
Conclusion
In this tutorial, we learned commands to list mounted drives or filesystems on Linux. I hope you enjoyed reading and please leave your suggestion in the comment section.
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About The Author
Bobbin Zachariah
Bobbin is a seasoned IT professional with over two decades of experience. He has excelled in roles such as a computer science instructor, Linux system engineer, and senior analyst. Currently, he thrives in DevOps environments, focusing on optimizing efficiency and delivery in AWS Cloud infrastructure. Bobbin holds certifications in RHEL, CCNA, and MCP, along with a Master’s degree in computer science. In his free time, he enjoys playing cricket, blogging, and immersing himself in the world of music.
6 Different Ways to List Hard Drives in Linux
This detailed guide will give you enough information to start using Emacs, and enough extra to make you want more.
6 Different Ways to List Hard Drives in Linux
There are several ways to list all the hard drives present in a system through Linux command lines.
Keep in mind a hard drive could be physically connected, virtually connected or even emulated (for example: when you use storage devices such as EMC, Sun or IBM).
Here are some different commands which can list the hard drives, keep in mind there are others but these are probably the most commonly used and easy to get the job done.
Listing Hard Drives in Linux
Please note that some of these commands are actually disk partitioning tools and listing disk partition is one of their features.
Let’s see what commands you can use to show disk info in Linux.
The df command in Linux is probably one of the most commonly used. It lists the actual “disk space usage” and it can give you information about what hard disks (or current disk space) is being used in the entire system.
The most common way to use it is with the -h argument which means “human readable” (because we are not machines, right?):
As you can see, the first column is the current logic name (or the name you can find it within your system), the second column is how big is each of them, the third column is how much is currently used (in bytes), the fourth column is how much is currently available in each for usage (in bytes), the fifth column is how much is used (in %) and the sixth and last column is where is it physically mounted in your Linux system.
Linode
2. fdisk
fdisk is another common option among sysops. It currently lists the different partitions (which is related to hard drives as a hard drive can be divided into several partitions) in your system.
This will return the entire amount of space (in GB or MB), the entire amount of bytes and the entire amount of sectors per each partition and as a summary, it also gives you the start and end sectors, the amount of disk space (in Bytes) and the type of partition.
Tip: Usually a SATA disk is labelled with sd.
3. lsblk
This one is a little more sophisticated but gets the job done as it lists all block devices. It will give you a very simple list of all devices:
It is probably more visual than the others as it even shows the partitions per each disk in a visual way (like the sda in the example above). It also gives information about the total size per each partition and disk and the physical location for each. This is very commonly used when you need to mount things to be used (like a USB stick or similar) so you can know where is it in order to proceed to mount it.
4. cfdisk
cfdisk is probably the most advanced one in GUI (Graphical User Interface), as it is absolutely visual and interactive. It allows at first to list all disks/partitions in your system but it also allows you to manage them by selecting them and then applying actions such as “Delete”, “Resize”, “Type” (to change partition Type) and “Write” changes done to partitions.
cfdisk example
It also gives you very friendly information about each partition and disk as it gives you where does each partition cylinders start and ends, amount of sectors used by each one and the full size of each one with its type. It won’t give you for example how much is used or free to use.
5. parted
This one is similar to previous ones mentioned, it lists all partitions and allows to manage them. Its main difference is that it also informs you the brand and model of your hard disks and even the type of connectivity used in it (scsi, sata, etc) and total disk size.
6. sfdisk
This is very similar to fdisk, however sfdisk allows you to see both physical and logical volumes and also gives you a “summary” of the actual physical volumes’ partitions with the cylinders (start and end), sectors, size and type.
Probably the “s” is for “super”, as it is a fdisk with super powers:
These commands should allow you to at least see what logical volumes, partitions and hard drives you have in your system and make use of this information for whatever reason you need it, being this just to know more or manipulate any of these.
Most of these commands also give you managing capabilities to modify and manipulate partitions at your will, so make sure to use them with responsibility.
If you like checking system information, do read the article about getting processor information in Linux command line.
If you have any questions or suggestions, do let me know in the comment section.