Linux Hard Disk name

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hi Guys

I need to know the Linux device names that it would assign to my Hard Disk , so that in AutoYast’s autoinst.xml file I can ask it to partition the right disk.
So as an e.g., if I have 3 disks on my system and I need to use a particular disk to install SLES on - The name could be /dev/hda, or /dev/hdb etc.
How would I get to know what Linux name does the HD (that I want to partition ) have?

Please help

thanks,
Nikhil

2

These days usually sda, sdb, sdc and so on.

Sounds like you are installing on lots of identical systems. If you have a more reliable way of identifying the disk, like on the second interface or something like that, you might like to use one of the other naming methods, e.g. look in /dev/disk/by-path.

PS: SLES has it’s own forum. See the forum index page.

3

thanks for reply ken-yap.

Basically, I initiate my installs thru Windows (where I first modify the autoinst.xml to reflect the h/w of the system). But I dont know how to get the /by-path info about each Hard Disk there? Do you know how to get the UUID of a disk in windows?

4

Boot with a live CD and /dev/disk/by-path it will be populated. Don’t work much with Windows so don’t know about getting the UUID. But it will be unique to each disk, or at least that’s the idea.

5

Can’t boot to live CD to get this info each time because I have 30 odd systems that keep changing h/w.

I need to determine the name.

6

If the hardware is all different, then something like “second disk” or “second interface” may not be a reliable locator. Perhaps you should use some other means of checking which is the correct intended disk perhaps by reading the disk label, or partition table, or part of the contents. Otherwise you may overwrite the wrong disk, etc. This may not be doable with autoyast, but then autoyast was intended for lots of identical systems. This doesn’t sound like your situation.

7

Also, if I want to use autoyast=default option to specify the .xml, and am booting off the SLED ISO file on another partition, where does autoyast go look for the autoinst.xml?
THe root of the .ISO ?

8

Yes but SLES probably uses the same basic drive detection as openSUSE does.
My setup is like this:
SDA1 is my swap
SDA2 is my root
SDA3 is my home

Any computer using SATA usually comes up as SDA, although i did see my drive come up as HDA in older versions of ubuntu but it wasnt detecting SATA drives that well until recently.
the 1, 2 3 designations is the number of the partition

Older hard drives using IDE usually comes up as HDA

Now CD/DVD drives are a little different depending on the linux versions.
On my system my CD/DVD drive is listed as SR0
And my burner is listed as SR1
But i have seen it come up as different on other linux distros.
On ubuntu its dev/dvd

On linux there are no A, B or C drives, but learning how drives are detected is mostly quite easy.
However there are one or two stumblers like other hard drives.

Like my USB hard drive, on openSUSE its listed as SDB1
On some other linux’s its listed as USB1
But meh it all depends on how that distro reads drives, but most likely SLED reads partitions/drives similar to openSUSE.
Not saying that it will though, but since the two stem from the same basic code maybe the two wont differ that much in drive/partition detection.