ext2 and fat16?

[Paul Howarth]

On Sun, 2005-05-29 at 00:09 -0700, Frank Chen wrote:
> Well, here is the long story.
> 
> I did mount it with "mount -t ext2 /dev/hdb2 /tmp/p2"
> and was able to work with it. I remember that I
> formatted this partition as ext2 during installation.
> That's why I mounted it without given it much thought.
> 
> 
> After I messed up the upgrade to kernel 2.6.11, I
> tried the grub command to find my old kernel. That's
> when I found out that this partition was fat16,
> because grub couldn't read it. By the way, it seems
> that the kernel 2.6.11 from kernel.org doesn't like
> the root=LABEL=/ parameter in the grub.conf. 
> 
> I decided to do a new installation and format this
> partition as ext2. After installation, "fdisk -l"
> still says that the partition is fat16 (id 6). 

fdisk is showing you the partition type recorded in the partition table;
it is not necessarily representative of the filesystem that is actually
on the partition. So you could have used fdisk to say that the partition
is FAT16 but actually run mke2fs to create an ext2 filesystem on it. I
suspect this is what has happened.

Paul.
-- 
Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org>