I'm logged into a server through the CLI and did a df -T and confirmed all my volumes are ext3. but when I do a tune2fs -l /dev/sde it tells me
tune2fs 1.39 (29-May-2006)
tune2fs: Permission denied while trying to open /dev/sde
Couldn't find valid filesystem superblock.

I don't have root access on the server, but is that why it's complaining, or is my syntax incorrect?

First error was:
Typically you should focus on the first error as it may be the source of later errors. In this case it told you it couldn't open the device due to a permission error which suggests that the most likely reason it couldn't find the superblock is is couldn't search for it in the first place.

Does /dev/sde exists?

What permissions are on the file?

Are you running your tune2fs command as root?

Does fdisk -l /dev/sde show you anything?

I dont have root access on the server unfortunately, which was my guess as to why it wasn't working, which I think you've just confirmed by your questioning. Thanks!

Try

/sbin/tune2fs

should work even as non-root, at least for read-only ops

thanks Chris, much appreciated.

<rant>
Security by obscurity is mind-numbingly inane.
Not quite as stupid as requiring root/sudo as Ubuntu tend to even for something as innocuous as "fdisk -l", but bloody close.
</rant>

Didn't work for me on CentOS5. It ran the command but got the permission error. I don't think his issue was finding tune2fs but rather that /dev/sde doesn't have permissions for him to read the device directly.

Typically disk files are owned by root and grouped to disk and no permissions are given to non-root users. There isn't much reason non-root users should be directly accessing disk devices especially if filesystems have been laid out on them. If they're being used for raw devices then one should be using /dev/raw paths rather than the device itself.

Also I missed it in the first reply: /dev/sde would be the entire disk - typically filesystems are laid out on disk partitions rather than the entire disk so it seems you should be looking at something like /dev/sde1 (first partition) rather than /dev/sde even if it were root. (Of course this assumes it isn't on an LVM Logical Volume or Metadisk software raid.) Run "df -h <filesystem_directory_mount>" to see what the device for the filesystem is.

I don't see this as a case of obscurity. As noted in my post above I don't believe the issue was lack of full path. The OP's original results show he had tune2fs in his PATH.

Point taken - I was in a particularly cranky mood with distro devs at the time. Not an unusual situation it must be said.