On Thu 01 Jun 2017 at 12:32:01 (-0400), Greg Wooledge wrote: > On Thu, Jun 01, 2017 at 12:23:56PM -0400, Stephen P. Molnar wrote: > > On 06/01/2017 10:24 AM, David Wright wrote: > > > > ? [!!] Partition disks ? > > > > ??? SCSI1 (0,0,0) (sda) - 60.0 GB ATA IC25N060ATMR04-0 > > > > ??? SCSI3 (0,0,0) (sdb) - 1.0 GB Generic Flash Disk > > > The above ...[!!] Partition disks... is exactly what I'm seeing. The > > question comes down to which option do I take? I only want to partition > > sda, so that I don't wipe the other drives in the system. > > The important part is that "sda" and "sdb" are not meaningful labels in > the general case. You need to look at the rest of the information -- > the size, the description, the model number, the existing partitions. > Use those to decide which disk to write to.
That's right. The strings you see above in the example are the /dev/disk/by-id files (or part thereof) and those filenames (or parts thereof) can frequently be found written on the outside of the disk's casing (and sometimes on the box) as Model/Serial/Part Number or whatever. When I managed to persuade the Computing Service to issue me with several disks at the same time (very infrequently), I would make sure I created partitions with slightly different (usually by one cylinder, a historical concept!) absolute and relative sizes so that I could distinguish them in circumstances where size was the only parameter visible. Cheers, David.