How to determine what partition is still not formatted?

[Paul Smith]

On 12/31/06, Paul Smith <phhs80 at gmail.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

The output of parted is:

Model: ST3160021A (ide)
Disk /dev/hde: 160GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system  Flags
 1      32.3kB  82.3GB  82.3GB  primary  ext3         boot
 2      82.3GB  160GB   77.8GB  primary               lvm

Paul