which fs on a partition?

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, Jul 13, 2007, Jorge Almeida wrote:
>On Fri, 13 Jul 2007, Bruce Marshall wrote:
>
>> On Friday 13 July 2007, Jorge Almeida wrote:
>>> Anyone knows any tool that would guess which fs (if any) was installed
>>> on a unmounted partition? The purpose is to make sure that the partition
>>> doesn't hold any forgotten data before nuking it.
>>
>> Just try mounting it.   The system will usually figure out what the FS is on
>> the partition.     Then just issue the 'mount' command by itself and it will
>> show you what the FS is.
>Tried that before posting:
>$ mount /dev/hda9 /mnt/prov
>mount: you must specify the filesystem type
>
>I think the partition doesn't hold a fs, but I wanted to be sure...

If you create an entry for the device in /etc/fstab with the file
system type ``auto'' the mount command will attempt to figure out
what kind of file system it is.

Booting on a knoppix live CD may also be useful.

Bill
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