I'm trying to boot Ubuntu from my USB drive. How do I know the drive name in Ubuntu since I haven't installed Ubuntu yet?
This guy is using /dev/sda1 for his USB drive. How did he figure that out?
I'm trying to boot Ubuntu from my USB drive. How do I know the drive name in Ubuntu since I haven't installed Ubuntu yet?
This guy is using /dev/sda1 for his USB drive. How did he figure that out?
When you boot Ubuntu from a Flash drive (where it is installed), it becomes the first USB device and is therefore named sda1
.
If you install Ubuntu using the Ubuntu LiveCD opening options (use the install option instead of the one that says try LiveCD) to a flash drive you have plugged in before booting the CD, it will get correctly installed. When you boot from the USB later, it will show up the device as '/dev/sda
'
Update:
Besides the Ubuntu reference in the comment,
here is a HowToGeek page for setting up a USB Installation from Windows.
The reason a USB disk becomes /dev/sda1 is that USB-based storage devices, as well as eSATA devices are managed by the SCSI subsystem, instead of the IDE subsystem. This explains the S in SDA. The D stands for Disk, and the A letter is for the first disk. The second disk would be B, C, D, etc. Finally, the "1" at the end is for the partition number 1. There is also the /dev/sda device, which is the entire disk, as opposed to a single partition. You will uyse it for example to manage the partitioning of a disk. You will enter a command such as :
sudo fdisk /dev/sda
Have a nice day :-)
JF
libata
is used and so both SCSI and IDE devices have sd
at the beginning of the device name.
Commented
Apr 13, 2010 at 13:56