Linux – How to figure out what harddrives are attached

sudo lshw -class disk

gives you everything but the mount point

  *-cdrom                 
       description: CD-R/CD-RW writer
       product: 52MAXX 3252AJ
       vendor: Memorex
       physical id: 0
       bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0
       logical name: /dev/cdrom
       logical name: /dev/cdrw
       logical name: /dev/scd0
       logical name: /dev/sr0
       version: QWS3
       capabilities: removable audio cd-r cd-rw
       configuration: ansiversion=5 status=nodisc
  *-disk:0
       description: SCSI Disk
       product: ZIP 100
       vendor: IOMEGA
       physical id: 0.1.0
       bus info: scsi@0:0.1.0
       logical name: /dev/sda
       version: 12.A
       capabilities: removable
       configuration: ansiversion=5
     *-medium
          physical id: 0
          logical name: /dev/sda
  *-disk:1
       description: ATA Disk
       product: WDC WD800AB-00CB
       vendor: Western Digital
       physical id: 1
       bus info: scsi@1:0.0.0
       logical name: /dev/sdb
       version: 04.0
       serial: WD-WCAA52477019
       size: 74GiB (80GB)
       capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos
       configuration: ansiversion=5 signature=90909090

sudo lshw -class disk -html

While this question probably belongs on super user.

Identifying the bad blocks isn't hard to do. You can use the program badblocks to do it. Getting it to ignore them is a tougher matter. If a drive is showing bad blocks then it means that the drive is out of spare blocks. It should probably just be trashed and I wouldn't pass that drive on to someone else.

If you must use this drive there is a chance that spinrite will get the drive back to a healthy state...but only if the drive has mistakenly marked some blocks as bad. Spinrite will check all the blocks on the drive including the ones marked as bad and if it determines that a block that the drive marked as bad is really good it will return it back to the usable blocks freeing up a block in the spare block list. If it finds enough of these the drive will show 0 bad blocks when you run badblocks and hopefully have some spare blocks to spare.

I had a laptop that had 120 badblocks and this dropped to 0 after running spinrite on the drive. Drive continues to work without any problems today 2 years later.