Levi Bard wrote:
> On Sat, 16 Oct 2004 11:12:14 -0400 (EDT), Eben King
> <eben1@tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
>
>>OK, how does one identify the filesystem on a device? "file" says:
>>
>>[root@pc root]# file - < /dev/sda
>>standard input: x86 boot sector
>>
>>(/dev/sda is one of these, 0.5 GB: http://kasercorp.com/usbjumbo.cfm )
>>
>>I successfully mounted it as ext2, but just because I happened to *know*
>>that was what it was. In general, what should I do? How about an offset
>>that'll skip ahead straight to the filesystem?
>>
>> offset in 1K blocks --vvv
>>dd if=/dev/sda bs=1024 skip=xxx | file -
>
>
> I never found a good solution to this other than trial && error.
I don't recall, but . . . is it possible to mount a drive or partition
without knowing the filesystem type, even if it's not in fstab? If so,
you should be able to mount it and use the mount command to find out.
I'm pretty sure I've mounted something that wasn't in fstab without
knowing the filesystem type, though I could be misremembering.
In any case, some of the information spat out by running fsck on an
unmounted filesystem might tell you what filesystem type it is. For
instance, I ran fsck on a drive I thought was formatted ext3 and it
informed me that fsck.reiserfs had been run on it, thus informing me
that my guess at the filesystem type had been wrong. This also has the
useful effect of telling you if the filesystem is damaged, in addition
to telling you what type it is.
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