Determining the available partitions

The first thing that we have to do is to determine the volumes that the Kernel thinks are available to it. We do this using the fdisk –l command.

Here's the output of the fdisk -l command before you've attached the USB hub and USB disks; the reader should note that only block devices (mmcblk) appear in the listing:

Tip

If you connect the USB flash drives one at a time to your hub, you can label them as sda and sdb in case they are ever removed.

Moreover, here's the output of the command after you've attached the disks. Note that several new devices have appeared now. Rather that block devices, these devices appear as /dev/sda1 and so on.

Tip

The term mount is a leftover from the "good old days" when a techie had to physically mount a disk or magnetic tape on a drive.

If you use the the df –k command, it will show you the filesystems that are mounted and their mount points.