How to differentiate between 2 identical 1TB hard drives?

Question

I have a system with Linux Mint and Windows 10 installed on it. My Windows 10 side has the boot drive on a 60gb partition of a 120gb SSD, with the data drive on a 1TB HDD (this has all my data on it). My Mint side also has the boot drive on a 60gb partition of a 120gb SSD, with the /home partition on a different 1TB HDD (the data on this one can be deleted). I need to replace Mint with Ubuntu, but I want to make sure I don't overwrite my data on Windows 10 data drive. Last time I did this I guessed and picked the wrong one and lost some files, and I don't want that to happen again. Is there a way I can differentiate between the two hard drives?

Answer 1

Assuming your disk is smart enabled, you can get a lot of information with smartctl:

$ smartctl -i /dev/sda

If all you want is the drive's serial number, you can filter it:

$ smartctl -i /dev/sda | grep -i serial

Substitute /dev/sda by the name of your devices.