How to tell which FS type

clunk · 10-21-2009, 09:38 AM

I got stumped today on a question, one of those where you think 'that's easy'.

Colleague asked me 'How do I tell if the file system is ext3 or Reiser'. Half listening I replied 'fdisk -l'.

"NO, that only gives me type 83" came the reply. An hour of googling later, I honestly don't know how to do this really simple thing. Can someone tell me how to get that info natively without having to install anything extra?

alphaniner · 10-21-2009, 09:58 AM

fsck -N should work, though there are probably better methods.

ThinkFree · 10-21-2009, 11:50 AM

If the partition is mounted, you can find filesystem type using

Quote:

mount

or

Quote:

df -T

clunk · 10-21-2009, 02:32 PM

No luck:

Code:

#fsck -N
fsck 1.41.3 (12-Oct-2008)

This is fine -

Code:

#df -T
Filesystem    Type   1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1     ext3   232140440 210167428  10180904  96% /

but I want to check an unmounted drive :-(

alphaniner · 10-21-2009, 03:42 PM

LOL sorry, I assumed you were familiar with fsck. You need to include the partition:

Code:

$ fsck -N /dev/sda5
[/sbin/fsck.ext3 (1) -- /dev/sda5] fsck.ext3 /dev/sda5
$ fsck -N /dev/sda6
[/sbin/fsck.reiserfs (1) -- /dev/sda6] fsck.reiserfs /dev/sda6

Admittedly, not an elegant solution. Plus I don't know what would happen if you tried it with a non-supported FS; but the -N means "Don’t execute, just show what would be done" so I doubt it would hurt anything.

clunk · 10-22-2009, 12:36 AM

I must confess to never having needed to use fsck. I know it's out there - but my dealings with it have been limited. Now I've said that, you know what will happen.....

Thanks for the solution - problem now solved :-)