How do I view all available HDD's/Partitions

Question

I was wondering if Ubuntu has an equivalent to the Windows feature "My Computer", which lists all available drives/storage devices. Typically, My Computer shows C:, which can be opened to view all of your directories and files. At this point, it is very similar to Ubuntu's Home Folder, but I am looking for something that allows me to view/select all available HDD's/Partitions.

Here's my reason: I found a 6gb IDE HDD in my basement, and got an IDE cable for it. My desktop computer has a SATA drive in it, but has an IDE slot, so I wanted to plug it in and see what might be on it. The drive seems to be recognized in BIOS, but I can't find it in Ubuntu to view files, and Ubuntu is the only OS on that particular computer. If anyone has any ideas as to how to view the contents of that drive WITHOUT formatting it or tampering with the contents in any way, I would greatly appreciate your help.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

The command-line solution:

• to check which drives your system can see:

  sudo fdisk -l
  

If your drive is in the list, you'll be able to see what partitions are on the drive, like this:

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
...

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *          63      208844      104391   83  Linux
/dev/sda2          208845     2313359     1052257+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda3         2313360   312576704   155131672+  83  Linux

Then create a directory somewhere and mount one of the partitions. For example, to mount a FAT32 partition located at dev/sda3 read-only into directory /media/my_test_mount you can do

sudo mount -t cifs -o ro /dev/sda3 /media/my_test_mount

This approach gives you more control, as you can use different mount options, for example mount the partition read-only.

See man mount for details.

Answer 2

Nautilus (where you view your home folder) will show all mounted drives on the system. If the drive is recognized by the computer you can mount it and begin to use it.

Directions and information about mounting drives can be found here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Mount