Easy way to detect hard drives and partitions in Linux

[Peter Hansen]

RunLevelZero wrote:
> I need a way to detect hard drives and their partitions... labels would
> be nice too... I did some googling but did not find anything all too
> useful. This will strictly be on Linux / Unix so any help would be
> greatly appreciated.

os.popen('/sbin/sfdisk -l /dev/hda') etc... ?

Or reading from /proc/ide and friends?