How to find out what disk drives are installed in a Ubuntu server
I have remote access (including root access) to a Ubuntu 9 server, but can't inspect it physically or reboot it.
I want to find out the manufacturer and model of the hard disks installed in the server and how they are connected (SATA / IDE, which version). Is there a command line way of doing this? (I can install additional software if necessary)
Solution 1:
If you do an fdisk -l as root it should list the drives and partitions like below:
Disk /dev/sda: 8589 MB, 8589934592 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1044 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00044ff8
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 994 7977984 83 Linux
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2 994 1045 407553 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 994 1045 407552 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda is the drive and each number is a partition.
So if you see hda or sda or sdb... this is what you use in the smartctl command.
you can get smartctl with sudo apt-get install smartmontools
Since mine is sda...
run sudo smartctl -i /dev/sda
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model: VBOX HARDDISK
Serial Number: VB3fd813ad-aa9ce411
Firmware Version: 1.0
User Capacity: 8,589,934,592 bytes
Device is: Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall]
ATA Version is: 6
ATA Standard is: ATA/ATAPI-6 published, ANSI INCITS 361-2002
Local Time is: Mon Jun 28 22:16:37 2010 PDT
SMART support is: Unavailable - device lacks SMART capability.
A mandatory SMART command failed: exiting. To continue, add one or more '-T permissive' options.
Solution 2:
The way I'd do it is...
smartctl -i /dev/sda
It will dump the SMART device information. This should give you a model number and maybe even serial number for the drive.