Linux filesystem Post: 99543

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Operating Systems Linux Linux filesystem Post 99543 by thmnetwork on Saturday 18th of February 2006 04:37:14 PM

02-18-2006

Registered User

well first off, unix has the design concept fo a "Unified Filesystem", which means that "everything is a file(tm)" this means the /dev/hda1 etc are just points of access to the partitions and while they're supposed to represent the filesystems, they're just files inside the larger system.

what this means is the everything gets put into one filesystem for simplifying the whole deal (rather than the VMS-style A: B: C: D: representation windows uses) this is so you won't have to know what partition a file is on, just where it is in the filesystem, which gives you a lot of freedom on partitioning if you know it won't break anything.

the /dev/hda hdb, etc are access points which means if you try to read them, you get the raw data on that partition, which is usually only useful for either mounting a partition or formatting one, regular users/admins hardly have use for it.

as an example: say hda1 was your root partition, but you wanted the hdb2 partition to be used for your users' home directories. Since all home directories are located under /home, you just mount hdb2 to /home and anything written to a file underneath /home will actually be written to the second partition on the second IDE drive(hdb2), instead of somewhere on first partition on the first drive (which is called hda1)

for more info:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Partition/
http://www.pathname.com/fhs

I hope this was helpful

thmnetwork

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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

hd

HD(4)							     Linux Programmer's Manual							     HD(4)

NAME

       hd - MFM/IDE hard disk devices

DESCRIPTION

       The  hd*  devices  are block devices to access MFM/IDE hard disk drives in raw mode.  The master drive on the primary IDE controller (major
       device number 3) is hda; the slave drive is hdb.  The master drive of the second controller (major device number 22) is hdc and	the  slave
       hdd.

       General	IDE block device names have the form hdX, or hdXP, where X is a letter denoting the physical drive, and P is a number denoting the
       partition on that physical drive.  The first form, hdX, is used to address the whole drive.  Partition numbers are assigned  in	the  order
       the  partitions	are  discovered,  and only nonempty, nonextended partitions get a number.  However, partition numbers 1-4 are given to the
       four partitions described in the MBR (the "primary" partitions), regardless of whether they are unused or extended.  Thus, the first  logi-
       cal  partition  will be hdX5.  Both DOS-type partitioning and BSD-disklabel partitioning are supported.	You can have at most 63 partitions
       on an IDE disk.

       For example, /dev/hda refers to all of the first IDE drive in the system; and /dev/hdb3 refers to the third DOS "primary" partition on  the
       second one.

       They are typically created by:

	      mknod -m 660 /dev/hda b 3 0
	      mknod -m 660 /dev/hda1 b 3 1
	      mknod -m 660 /dev/hda2 b 3 2
	      ...
	      mknod -m 660 /dev/hda8 b 3 8
	      mknod -m 660 /dev/hdb b 3 64
	      mknod -m 660 /dev/hdb1 b 3 65
	      mknod -m 660 /dev/hdb2 b 3 66
	      ...
	      mknod -m 660 /dev/hdb8 b 3 72
	      chown root:disk /dev/hd*

FILES

       /dev/hd*

SEE ALSO

       chown(1), mknod(1), sd(4), mount(8)

COLOPHON

       This  page is part of release 3.44 of the Linux man-pages project.  A description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can
       be found at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.

Linux								    1992-12-17								     HD(4)