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Listing hardware on a Linux system. And using the UUID drive identifiers.

Listing hardware on a Linux system. This is easy when using the Linux command-line. In the olden days, you would use the cat /proc/pci command to list hardware installed on the PCI bus, but this /proc file is deprecated and does not exist on modern Linux systems. The lspci command is the modern way to list the hardware on your system and is useful when troubleshooting your Linux system.

lspci -vv

The lspci -vv command shown above is the verbose version of the lspci command and will display a lot of information about your hardware. The /dev directory contains all of the device nodes for all of your devices. The modern Linux distributions mount your drives under the /media directory using the UUID identifiers, but there will always be a /dev file for the drive as well. For example /dev/sdd1. Therefore you could type mount /dev/sdd1 /mnt/drive1 to mount the drive as root, but a UUID identifier for your external hard drive will not change unless you format the partition and therefore if you wish to add the drive to the /etc/fstab then the UUID method is better.

For example, mounting a NTFS external hard disk.

UUID=GTH2-G653    /mnt/media    ntfs-3g    defaults    0 0

Using the UUID identifier is the best way to add your drives to the /etc/fstab file.

And this is how my / filesystem is mounted on my Debian 6.0 installation.

UUID=7999ef9f-793f-46c7-ba27-13f3559d15f9    /    ext4    errors=remount-ro    0 1

The UUID identifier is used for the partition containing the root file-system. if you look under the /dev/disk/by-uuid folder, then you will see the UUID identifiers for each mounted drive on the system. And you can see what /dev/sd* device file they are mapped to. This can be very useful sometimes.

[neo@deusexmachina]:~> ls /dev/disk/by-uuid/
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 280 May  2  2012 .
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 120 May  2 13:20 ..
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  10 May  2 13:20 0A11-5FA0 -> ../../sdi1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  10 May  2  2012 1a9b7944-95ed-4b3c-85d3-c1824f2892ab -> ../../sdd6
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  10 May  2 13:20 3f5684e0-0d40-4628-9a69-094ca671b291 -> ../../sdb1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  10 May  2 13:20 3fabc97d-c76a-4922-8705-5536e89cfd21 -> ../../sdb2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  10 May  2 13:20 52d826a6-7de5-45db-b693-dd7c7e82af37 -> ../../sdb5
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  10 May  2 13:20 552e6388-4ee8-4d09-a58a-b3472a9ec149 -> ../../sda2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  10 May  2  2012 7999ef9f-793f-46c7-ba27-13f3559d15f9 -> ../../sdd1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  10 May  2 13:20 F824FD9424FD565A -> ../../sdc1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  10 May  2 13:20 a6f66737-afea-48c3-9694-f6da22904d37 -> ../../sda3
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  10 May  2  2012 a87281f5-c64c-40dc-a3c4-5b10f475296e -> ../../sda5
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  10 May  2 13:20 e01436e0-4aa5-420b-94aa-0b35bd00020e -> ../../sda1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  10 May  2  2012 f61a17c6-98c2-4f35-bdbc-90487f3ca430 -> ../../sdd5

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