[H-GEN] altering disk partitions

[Paul Gearon]

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On Thu, 27 Mar 2003, James Lever wrote:

> According to alex_del at bigpond.net.au (on Thu, Mar 27, 2003 at 08:19:37AM +1000):
> > IDE drives are labelled hda, hdb etc. SCSI devices and CD drives use
> > sda etc. What is md0? what is ad0s?
>
> hd == hard disk
> sd == scsi disk
>
> md == meta disk
> ad == atapi disk (atapi is the ide bus)

As a more general answer...

Look at the major/minor numbers for the device and compare with
Documentation/devices.txt in your friendly kernel sources.

For instance, say I don't know what /dev/vcs2 is.  I can find out about
it with a long listing:
  ls -l /dev/vcs2
or for those of us with devfs:
  ls -lL /dev/vcs2

...and I get:
  crw-------    1 root     root       7,   2 Jan  1  1970 /dev/vcs2
So then I look for a "character" device on major 7, minor 2 in the
devices.txt file:

------------------------------
  7 char        Virtual console capture devices
                  0 = /dev/vcs          Current vc text contents
                  1 = /dev/vcs1         tty1 text contents
                    ...
                 63 = /dev/vcs63        tty63 text contents
                128 = /dev/vcsa         Current vc text/attribute contents
                129 = /dev/vcsa1        tty1 text/attribute contents
                    ...
                191 = /dev/vcsa63       tty63 text/attribute contents

                NOTE: These devices permit both read and write access.
------------------------------

Back to your original question, I don't have any md* nor ad* devices
because I run devfs, but devices.txt tells me that if I did have them, the
md devices would look something like:

  brw-rw----    1 root     disk       9,   0 Jan  1  1970 /dev/md0
  brw-rw----    1 root     disk       9,   1 Jan  1  1970 /dev/md1
  brw-rw----    1 root     disk       9,   2 Jan  1  1970 /dev/md2



Regards,
Paul Gearon

Software Engineer                Telephone:   +61 7 3876 2188
Plugged In Software              Fax:         +61 7 3876 4899
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