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Hard Drives and Partitions

Every drive (or CD-ROM, DVD, etc) corresponds to a device.
Device files are in /dev.

IDE drives are named: hda, hdb, hdc, ...

SCSI drives are named: sr0, sr1, sr2, ...

Hard drives are separated into partitions. e.g.:

hda1 (/dev/hda1), hda2 (/dev/hda2), etc,

for the partitions of the primary master hard disc.
On UNIX, each partition has its own directory.

Tools

fdisk: Interactive partitioning utility.

A new disk has no partition information.
The command fdisks your primary master: fdisk /dev/hda

mkfs: Build a Linux file system on a device (usually a hard disk partition).

fsck: File System Repair.