NAME | DESCRIPTION | FILES | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON
HD(4) Linux Programmer's Manual HD(4)
hd - MFM/IDE hard disk devices
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 non-empty, non-extended 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 logical 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*
/dev/hd*
chown(1), mknod(1), sd(4), mount(8)
This page is part of release 3.23 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)