How to find a certain device and mount it correctly

Question

I have booted with the System Rescue CD and I have figured out how to mount a windows partition by using for example mount or ntfs-3g. But how do I know what device is what drive? If I have some internal hard drives and some usb drives plugged in, how can I find out what is what? And what about dvd drives? How do I see what is what there, and how do I mount those?

Answer 1

lshw -short -c storage,disk,volume will display a reasonably friendly report on your disks and partitions. It does show what drive is attached to what controller, and the size and type of each partition on each drive.

file -s /dev/sd* is another way to see filesystem types and sizes, but not controller attachments. fdisk -l shows mostly the same useful information, in a slightly less accurate way (partition data rather than filesystem data), but better presented.

Answer 2

Well it's kind of hard to see whats on the drive itself without mounting it. If you know the approximate sizes of the drive, you can take a look at that information with fdisk and narrow down your search. fdisk -l in particular will give you the verbose information you want.