How to determine what partition is still not formatted?

[Jim Cornette]

Paul Smith wrote:
> On 12/31/06, Jim Cornette <fc-cornette at insight.rr.com> wrote:
>> >> ... if you issue parted /dev/sdx and then print, you are able to
>> >> see all the partitions on sdx, including flags, filesystems a.s.o.
>> >
>> > Thanks.
>> >
>> > Hadn't tried that, but it doesn't look like any more information than I
>> > can get from fdisk. E.g. parted's 'print' shows the partition type, but
>> > doesn't actually test whether there's a formatted file system there
>> > unless you're doing a file system operation on it. And it feels 
>> safer to
>> > me to just try and mount a partition temporarily, and read-only if you
>> > really want to be careful.
>>
>> I guess if you see the partition type with fdisk and then try to mount
>> the partition or activate the partition, it will tell you if it is
>> formatted with the filesystem that it claims to be.
>>
>> Other than that, I never thought to try any out of the ordinary program
>> to figure out if it is setup with a filesystem. I did that for DOS, so I
>> guess other filesystem presence would work the same.
> 
> Thanks to all. The disk where I suspect that there is some unformatted
> space is the following ('fdisk output'):
> 
> Disk /dev/hde: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
> 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
> 
>   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/hde1   *           1       10000    80324968+  83  Linux
> /dev/hde2           10001       19457    75963352+  8e  Linux LVM
> 
> Paul
> 

If you are trying to diagnose the LVM partition, there is a visual tool 
for setting up LVM partitions and it will also show visually what the 
partitions are made up as.

Go to System/Administration/Logical Volume Management on the GNOME menus 
and try to launch the program.

The first partition is regular partition and should be mountable with 
making a directory for the volume  and mounting it with
mount /dev/hde1 /mnt/MyCreatedDirectory
  whatever that would be.

Jim

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