Now for some confusion.

The filesystem type reported by fdisk, qtparted, etc. may not be correct. These utilities do not actually inspect the filesystem, but merely access and report a number that ranges from 0 to FF, corresponding to the different filesystem types.

You can start fdisk and select “l” to get a listing of the different filesystem types/names. For that matter, you can change a reported filesystem type to any of the options without altering the actual filesystem.

For example, when you manually set up a software raid, you have to change the filesystem type of the partitions from (presumably) “linux” (type 83) to “linux raid autodetect” (type fd). Otherwise, the OS will not identify it correctly on boot.

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So how do you figure out what an “unknown” filesytem is using simple tools? The first thing you should do is to run pvscan to pick up any LVM physical volumes that might be involved. You might be looking at an LVM physical volume and not a simple partition holding a standard filesystem.

If it wasn’t an LVM physical volume, then you can start trying to identify the filesystem type. Since the list of likely filesystems is fairly short, you can just ask the various fsck tests to have a look and see if one recognizes it. For example, if you think it’s ext3, then let e2fsck look at it and see what it reports.

And, of course, when you figure out which one it is, you need to alter the reported filesystem type to match what it really is.

Heh... I didn't see this moved to page two of replies... oops.
Anyway.... after all that time spent on the phone with 3ware and fixing the raid, now another disk is showing as degraded. I'll deal with it Tuesday I guess. Grr.

Saddly, fdisk -l DID show the raid as linux two days ago, after the repair, but now it's not loading the raid at all. I asked the person who originally set it up and yep, it's ext3.

Things I tried:
# pvscan
/dev/sda: read failed after 0 of 4096 at 0: Input/output error
/dev/sda: read failed after 0 of 4096 at 0: Input/output error
/dev/sda1: read failed after 0 of 4096 at 0: Input/output error

Looks like it knows SOMETHING is there... but is freaking out somehow.

And:
# e2fsck -n /dev/sda1
e2fsck 1.38 (30-Jun-2005)
e2fsck: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while trying to open /dev/sda1
Could this be a zero-length partition?

If you knew me IRL, you'd see how the bad luck just makes sense for me.
thanks....
C-