topic Re: Access to 2nd physical Disk in Operating System - Linux

Access to 2nd physical Disk

Scott McDade — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 14:14:50 GMT

Hello:

System info: HP xw8400 and HP xw8600
OS info – RH 4.0 WS

I am wondering if it is possible to access a 2nd physical disk that I have and would like to get data from? I basically have 2 (250 Gb) hard drives configured the same way running the same OS. It’s just one has a bunch of my old data on it as it was the primary boot disk for a xw8400. I have since upgraded to the xw8600 and would like to keep the old xw8400 disk as a secondary non-bootable disk and simply have access to its data and utilize its disk space if possible. The new xw8600 has 4 drive bays so I am thinking it is probably possible. Neither disk is RAID configured and I would like to keep it that way for now. All I want to do is periodically retrieve the data from the old disk (xw8400) while I am getting the new disk (xw8600) configured and qualified. The xw8400 box is dead so tar’ing the data is not an option and there must be enough of a difference in the hardware between the xw8400 and xw8600 box that the xw8400 disk won’t boot in the xw8600 chassis. Any ideas for accessing the data?????

Cheers .... > Scott

Re: Access to 2nd physical Disk

dirk dierickx — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 06:46:41 GMT

i'm guessing the other disk is probably available as sdb, check which 'sd' devices you have

ls /dev/sd*

then you can simply mount the partitions with the mount command, like such;

mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt

Re: Access to 2nd physical Disk

Goran Koruga — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 07:14:10 GMT

Hi.

Do you have both disks connected on the new system?

If so, simply find its device (probably sdb):

ls -l /sys/block

Look at other files in the dirs below that one to find it by model, or use the files in "/dev/disk" dirs to find it.

Regards,
Goran