How to determine what partition is still not formatted?

[Paul Smith]

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
>
> 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.

Thanks, Jim. hde1 mounts correctly. The visual LVM tool indicates no
filesystem in hde2.

Paul