New drive already has vfat after new fdisk

[Nat Gross]

On 1/26/06, Andy Green <andy at warmcat.com> wrote:
> Nat Gross wrote:
>
> >>What led you to the conclusion that it is VFAT?  I didn't see anything
> >>showing that in your mail.
> >
> > oops. Should have mentioned. Gnome System Monitor showed it as vfat/
>
> > /dev/sda1 on /media/usbdisk type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,_netdev,utf8)
>
> AIUI the byte in the partition table that holds 0x83 ("Linux") has no
> direct relationship to the actual format of the filesystem on that
> partition, which could be different.  IIRC you set that byte at fdisk
> time, but the mkfs.blah is done afterwards.  So a partition of type 0x83
> with VFAT on it is perfectly possible.
>
> Did you run mkfs.ext2 -j on /dev/sda1 yet?  If not, then you are looking
> at the VFAT filesystem, or the first part of it anyway, that shipped
> with the drive.
# mkfs.ext3 -j /dev/sda1
mke2fs 1.38 (30-Jun-2005)
/dev/sda1 is mounted; will not make a filesystem here!
=======================
What I fail to understand is that I expect to have 3 partitions.
Can I just unmount and mkfs? What about sda2 and sda3? Where are they?

tx
-nat