If you've ever looked in your /etc/fstab file, you have may have seen an entry that looks like UUID=62fa5eac-3df4-448d-a576-916dd5b432f2 instead of a more familiar disk drive designation, such as /dev/hda1. Such entries are called universally unique identifiers (UUID). You can use these 128-bit numbers to make hard disk management easier.

/etc/fstab contains a listing of all of the potential mounted drives on the system both local and remote. The file /etc/rc.sysinit reads the /etc/fstab to mount the drives on startup. This text file is the file you edit if you wanted to mount a partition permanently once the system boots.

So I've noticed when running Ubuntu that while my external drives will show up on my desktop when I turn the computer on, my internal drives don't.

Some times you need to know the device node identifier. e.g. /dev/sda1, a partition UUID, a partition label or partition type (ntfs,fat32 etc). By using the following command you can see all the relevant information about your partitions.

Modern hard drives can tell you quite a bit about how they’re doing and show you some statistics about themselves. It won’t necessarily give you a realistic guess of when your drive is going to die, but it can help to keep tabs on things nevertheless.

Vincent Danen has some tips for using the smartmontools package to obtain important information about the health of your hard drives that could provide early warning signs of problems.

I recently spoke with a lady who operates a Forensic Accounting consultancy. During the course of our conversation, she indicated that from time-to-time she receives requests for computer data related assistance. Namely, obtaining deleted information off hard drives or data off failed drives. Her business operates on Windows based platforms and she was wondering how productive I had found Linux.

Sometimes the GUI is just too slow. Learn how to resize images, add drop shadows, splice mp3s, clone hard drives and more with the command line. Here are a few tasks that you might want to consider using the command line for.

It is well known that the so-called "solid-state disks" (SSD) have very low access times. I could have tried to buy an SSD, but being a tinkerer, I decided for another option. Thumb drives / flash drives / pen drives are also a kind of SSDs, one could say - but they have lousy transfer rates. In the end, I decided to create a software RAID using four 2GB USB drives.