How to determine what partition is still not formatted?

[Jim Cornette]

Joe Smith wrote:
> kalinix 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.
> 
> <Joe
> 

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.

Jim

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