How to mount and unmount a hard drive in Linux?

Techie, tutorials June 25th, 2010

I lease multiple Linux servers. One of them has multiple hard drives installed in it. After asking the data center to reload the OS on it, the staff only mounted one of the drives. Surprisingly it is extremely easy for anyone with a root access to mount a hard drive on a Linux-based system. Here I will show you the very basic ways to mount and unmount a hard drive.

For starters, you should first see what hard drives and partitions are available. A real quick way to see the available hard drives in your system is to run the command fdisk -l. The results will give you some helpful information about the drive(s), as well as information on the partitions.

I should point out that your hard drive or drives might be identified on your system as hd or sd. If you have multiple drives they will be identified by a letter, i.e. hda / hdb, or sda /sdb. The partitions on each drive will be identified numerically, i.e. hda1 /hda2, or sdb1 /sdb2. You can see this in the screenshot above.

Here is how to mount a hard drive in Linux.

First thing you should do is create a directory where the drive or partition will be mounted. In my case, I use the second hard drive for backups so I…

Verizon rep – being a long time customer is definitely important, but….

Critic's Realm, General, Today I learned July 25th, 2009

I just got off the phone with a Verizon Wireless representative. I was inquiring about upgrading my phone and what kind of deal they could offer me. I had to revert back to a 5 year old phone due to a recent mishap with the mobile phone I was actively using. The deal they could offer me was … none! Even after I mentioned that I have been a Verizon Wireless customer since 1998 the guys could not  offer me anything, because my number still has 6 months left before it becomes eligible for the “sponsored” upgrade, which of course comes with a mandatory 1 or 2 year contract.

What the heck? I have been a Verizon customer for over 10 years now. I have had Verizon land line numbers, I’ve had Verizon DSL. I have also had and still have multiple mobile lines with Verizon, but apparently none of this is a factor. What happened to customer appreciation for brand loyalty. I can tell you what happened to it. It is gone, if it ever existed! From my experience with Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and other companies, a customer’s loyalty is only tracked as long as that customer doesn’t change their number, address or service. More on that in a future post.

Unlike AT&T we have not ever had any problems with the service, but I…

XBox 360 no video, only audio

Featured, Techie, gaming, tutorials, video June 15th, 2009

Over the weekend I had some lack of video from my XBox360. Nothing that some heat couldn’t fix. Apparently most problems with the Xbox360 are fixed by that which kills PCs – heat.

I have an XBox360, which is one of those that was born with bugs and “genetic” issue – meaning an early version – one from the early ones, made before the red ring of death became evident  and all the various versions started to come out. Luckily, I don’t abuse and rarely spend massive amount of hours playing it, thus I don’t have very many problem with it! Other than the occasional screen flicker and the constant refusal of the DVD-Rom tray to actually stay closed after attempting to close it. Apparently the DVD drive gets a bad taste from DVD discs and refuses to work with them. HAHA. My solution for the latter is to place my thumb on the drive tray and prevent it from coming back out, then pushing the open/close button again!!

This past weekend I experienced something new – the XBox booted fine and there was audio, but no video. The digital TV detected an active video source, but there was no picture. At first I was going to disassemble the XBox to look for problem myself, because the warranty had expired a long time ago. But then I decided…

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