FreeBSD Find Out all Installed Hard Disk Information
Q. How do I find out all installed hard disk names under FreeBSD without rebooting the server? How do I use the equivalent of fdisk -l in Linux, with FreeBSD to list all hard disks?
A. The easiest way to find out detected hardware information under FreeBSD is go through /var/run/dmesg.boot file. This file is usually a snapshot of the buffer contents taken soon after file systems are mounted at startup time. It is not modified till system is rebooted. Just Linux, FreeBSD follows some sort of physical disk naming conventions:
a] IDE Hard disk names starts with ad - /dev/ad0 first IDE hard disk, /dev/ad1 second hard disk and so on
b] SCSI Hard disk names starts with da - /dev/da*
c] IDE CDROM/RW/DVD names starts with acd - /dev/acd*
d] SCSI CDROM/RW/DVD names starts with cd - /dev/cd*
List all detected hard disk / cdroms
Type the following command, enter:
# egrep 'ad[0-9]|cd[0-9]' /var/run/dmesg.boot
Output:
acd0: DVDROMat ata0-slave UDMA33 ad4: 239372MB at ata2-master SATA150 ad6: 239372MB at ata3-master SATA150 Trying to mount root from ufs:/dev/ad4s1a
From above output it is clear that I've following storage installed:
- ad4 : My First hard disk connected to ATA channel 2
- ad6: My Second hard disk connected to ATA channel 3
- acd0 : My DVD ROM
atacontrol command
The atacontrol utility is a control program that provides the user access and control to the FreeBSD ata (IDE / SATA hard disk) subsystem.
WARNING! These examples may crash your computer and loss of data if executed improperly. Please exercise caution when using atacontrol command!The list option can list all hard disk, enter:
# atacontrol list
Output:
ATA channel 0:
Master: no device present
Slave: acd0 ATA/ATAPI revision 7
ATA channel 1:
Master: no device present
Slave: no device present
ATA channel 2:
Master: ad4 Serial ATA II
Slave: no device present
ATA channel 3:
Master: ad6 Serial ATA II
Slave: no device present
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Related Other Helpful FAQs:
- FreeBSD: Get / Read Hard Disk Temperature using smartd tools
- What happens when hard disk fails in raid 5
- How do I permanently erase hard disk?
- Howto find out or Learn harddisk size in Linux or UNIX
- Linux SATA controllers not recognize my attached hard disk devices
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Tags: /dev/acd, /dev/ad, /dev/cd, /dev/da, /var/run/dmesg.boot, atacontrol command, freebsd ide harddisk, freebsd list hard disk, freebsd scai hardisk, grep command, hard disk information
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