There are a few different ways to find out a drives(sdcard, usb drive, external hard drive) name.
dmesg command
One way to do it is to look at dmesg. Insert your drive and then run the command. It displays a lot of info, what we are interested in is the end which should say something about your drive.
dmesg
[ 4443.109976] mmc0: new high speed SDHC card at address aaaa
[ 4443.111857] mmcblk0: mmc0:aaaa SU04G 3.69 GiB
[ 4443.120836] mmcblk0: p1 p2
[ 4453.045338] EXT4-fs (mmcblk0p2): recovery complete
[ 4453.086165] EXT4-fs (mmcblk0p2): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null)
[ 4453.086184] SELinux: initialized (dev mmcblk0p2, type ext4), uses xattr
This tells us that the device is mmcblk0. The “p2” at the end is the partition number.
df Command
Another way to do it is to run the df command.
Run the below command without your drive plugged in.
df -h
it’ll return something like this
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/fedora-root 50G 12G 36G 24% /
devtmpfs 1.9G 0 1.9G 0% /dev
tmpfs 1.9G 600K 1.9G 1% /dev/shm
tmpfs 1.9G 1.0M 1.9G 1% /run
tmpfs 1.9G 0 1.9G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs 1.9G 28K 1.9G 1% /tmp
/dev/sdb1 477M 115M 333M 26% /boot
/dev/mapper/fedora-home 76G 45G 23G 87% /home
The above command returns all the partitions that are mounted on your computer.
Now mount your drive and run the command again, it should show your drive at the bottom.
[me@fedora ~]$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/fedora-root 50G 12G 36G 24% /
devtmpfs 1.9G 0 1.9G 0% /dev
tmpfs 1.9G 600K 1.9G 1% /dev/shm
tmpfs 1.9G 1.1M 1.9G 1% /run
tmpfs 1.9G 0 1.9G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs 1.9G 28K 1.9G 1% /tmp
/dev/sdb1 477M 115M 333M 26% /boot
/dev/mapper/fedora-home 76G 45G 23G 87% /home
/dev/mmcblk0p2 3.6G 2.3G 1.1G 69% /run/media/me/fc522c75-9sws
You can see that the bottom one “/dev/mmcblk0p2 ” is the partition of the drive you just plugged in.
Using fdisk
You can also use fdisk.
sudo fdisk -l
It will return something similar to the following.
Disk /dev/mapper/fedora-home: 78.8 GiB, 191931351040 bytes, 374865920 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 3.7 GiB, 3965190144 bytes, 7744512 sectors
The bottom section is the drive “mmcblk0”.
Using lsblk
lsblk is another cool tool to list drives and partions. When run with the -p option it shows the path to the drive and partition.
Example output of what you may get with “lsblk -p”
admin@localhost:~$ lsblk -p
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
/dev/nvme1n1 259:0 0 450G 0 disk
├─/dev/nvme1n1p1 259:1 0 499M 0 part
├─/dev/nvme1n1p2 259:2 0 100M 0 part
├─/dev/nvme1n1p3 259:3 0 16M 0 part
└─/dev/nvme1n1p4 259:4 0 449.3G 0 part
/dev/nvme0n1 259:5 0 477G 0 disk
├─/dev/nvme0n1p1 259:6 0 512M 0 part /boot/efi
├─/dev/nvme0n1p2 259:7 0 732M 0 part /boot
└─/dev/nvme0n1p3 259:8 0 400G 0 part
└─/dev/mapper/vg-root 253:1 0 391G 0 lvm /
└─/dev/mapper/vg-swap_1 253:2 0 7.9G 0 lvm [SWAP]
admin@localhost:~$