Ext3 partition being detected as vfat partition?

sylvester_0 · 10-19-2006, 12:39 PM

First of all, my hard drive with one large ext3 partition is not getting mounted at startup. The device is located at /dev/hdb1.

Code:

/# mount /320
mount special device /dev/disk/by-uuid/5f8794bc-a47d-4a18-a93a-ad87aaffddbc does not exist

Ok, no problem. I'll just mount it manually.

Code:

/# mount /dev/hdb1 /320
/# cd 320
/320# ls
???.??  ??8???8?.??8  ??y.??y

WTF?!? Where are all my files?

Code:

/# umount 320
/# mount /dev/hdb1 /320 -t ext3
/# cd 320
/320# ls
jared  lost+found  pics

Thank alah! All of my pr0n and *ahem* important documents are still there. So, what's the problem?

Code:

/# vol_id /dev/hdb1
ID_FS_USAGE=filesystem
ID_FS_TYPE=vfat
ID_FS_VERSION=FAT12
ID_FS_UUID=
ID_FS_LABEL=
ID_FS_LABEL_SAFE=

Ok, I remembered from school that FAT12 was for FLOPPY DISKS and had no support for directories. The question is, why would this partition decide all of a sudden that it is VFAT? When I run a e2fsck it claims that the partition is clean. Running a search on google for "ID_FS_VERSION=FAT12" comes up with one (!) result.

Ideas?

Linux deneb 2.6.17-10-generic #2 SMP Fri Oct 13 18:45:35 UTC 2006 i686 GNU/Linux

acid_kewpie · 10-19-2006, 01:12 PM

check what fdisk says about the actual flag set on the partition. what the partition is listed as containing doesn't necessarily match what actually is there. you can change the id type if you need to in fdisk (or cfdisk or whatever) without any danger to the data itself.

sylvester_0 · 10-19-2006, 01:25 PM

Thanks for the quick reply. Here is the output of fdisk.

Code:

root@deneb:/# fdisk /dev/hdb

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 38913.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
   (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help): print

Disk /dev/hdb: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdb1   *           1       38913   312568641   83  Linux

The Id appears to be the same as my other drive containing my root, home, etc partitions. Just to be obstinate I set the Id to 83 again, wrote the changes and tried mounting again - same problem.

hippo31 · 03-31-2007, 09:48 AM

Hi,

I actually have exactly the same problem as sylvester_0 except that I am on /dev/sda
My disk is cut like this

Code:

 -----------------------------------------------------------
|      |    | -------------------------------------- |......|
| ext3 |swap||                 ext3                 ||. XP .|
|      |    | -------------------------------------- |......|
 -----------------------------------------------------------

And until I installed XP I was not having any problem with my root FS type
Then I decided to install XP at the end of my disk. Resized /dev/sda5, made some tries to install XP in a logical (/dev/sda6), it failed so have boot on an XP CD and launched fixmbr and fixboot, this made nothing. Finally I installed XP on the last primary and reloaded grub.
After that problems became to come, unable to load root FS during linux boot time because I had specify root=LABEL=label for the root partition. Changing this to root=/dev/sda1 allowed me to correctly start my system. Also I noticed that /dev/disk/by-label and /dev/disk/by-uuid didn't contain any reference to /dev/sda1. After some searches I found that vol_id /dev/sda1 detected it as a FAT12 FS type ... wheras fdisk says that it is really an ext3 one.

An idea to correct it whould be greatly appreciated