Can't see hard disks

Question

I'm running alpine 3.2.0 installed on a thumb drive. once I boot my linux box using the usb, I can't see my hard disks, despite having two of them installed. when I run df -h or df -a, i can't see where they are mounted in the file system. Please note that am booting from a flash drive. Please help

Answer 1

df shows mounted filesystems, not hard disks. To see your hard disks, use parted, fdisk or lsblk. Once you have identified

• your disks,
• their partitions, and
• the filesystems in the partitions

you may mount the filesystems somewhere (that is, mount each filesystem on a directory) and then df will show them. It is not usual for a Linux system to mount hard-disk-based filesystems automatically.

Edit: See Mercy Flicker's comment for the complete details of how the problem was solved.