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My Ubuntu desktop has two Hard Drives, 1 GB (primary, formatted) and 500 MB (unformatted, never mounted).

If I try to detect the partition using the command cat /proc/partitions, the result is:

major minor  #blocks  name

   8        0  488386584 sda
   8        1  454864896 sda1
   8        2          1 sda2
   8        5   33518592 sda5
   8       16  976762584 sdb
   8       17  943241216 sdb1
   8       18          1 sdb2
   8       21   33518592 sdb5
  11        0    1048575 sr0

Which exactly is the 500 GB second hard drive and how could I format it so that it mounts automatically at boot time?

Thanks

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  • 500 MB or 500 GB. It would be clear if you post the outputs of sudo blkid and sudo lsblk commands. May 19, 2014 at 16:35
  • sudo lsblk should make the connected drives and partitions on them abundantly clear. sudo blkidcombined with that will help answering the 2nd part of your question
    – Elder Geek
    May 19, 2014 at 16:43

2 Answers 2

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This is a 500 GB drive:

   8        0  488386584 sda

This is a 1 TB drive:

   8       16  976762584 sdb

However, they both appear to be already formatted. In any case, you should probably use gparted if you need to format/partition a disk.

I don't know of a GUI program to manage mounting, so I simply edit /etc/fstab or put a file in /etc/fstab.d/. The latter is probably the way to go. The file should have a single line for each paritition in the following format:

/dev/sdXN <tab> /media/blah <tab> ext4 <tab> defaults <tab> 0 <tab> 1

You should replace the dummy data with actual values and the mount point should be a directory that exists. You can use an UUID instead of /dev/sdXN to allow you to copy the partition over to another disk later.

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An easy method would be to use disks or disk utility from the gui. This will provide information on disks, their sizes, their partitions and where they are mounted (if so). see below

disk utility

You can also mount and unmount partitions from here. For permanent mounts

sudo gedit /etc/fstab is your best bet.

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    The disk utility is fine for looking up details on disks, but I wouldn't recommend it for modifying anything. It seems very flaky – I've had it crash out from under me – and the launchpad stats seem to support it being currently more buggy than gparted (103 open bugs, one of which is wishlist vs. 21, seven of which are wishlist).
    – otus
    May 20, 2014 at 10:31
  • @otus Agreed. The question is about determining partitions. Gparted is by far superior for modifying. I use it myself. All I ever use the Disk utility for is mounting/unmounting temporary storage and looking up details on disk. That's all my answer recommended.
    – Elder Geek
    May 20, 2014 at 15:07

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