File system type

[Grobbendonk]

Hi,

I've just inherited a PC which suffered a catastrophic failure (power supply fritzed, blew out the motherboard). It sported two physical hard disks, "hda" was the root of a red-hat install and "hdb" simply stack of shared data.

I've put both disks onto into a slackware 8.1 machine in an attempt to rescue as much data as possible. The partitions on hda all mount fine, using swap/ext2/ext3. But I can't mount the single partition on hdb, it just gives me "bad superblock" even when mounted with "-t auto". Partition type is 83 according to fdisk. Worse, the owner knows he put a non-ext filesystem on it, but he doesn't remember which one!

So, my question is - is there any way I can find out what file system is on that partition without having to mount it? Because I can't mount it until I know! Or is there a way to prove that it is basically fried?

Thanks, nic

[genesus]

not sure how to find out, but you could look up the common fs(s) used under linux and test each one of those independantly, e.g. reiserfs is pretty common now. also in fstab is can you could try "auto" in the stead of the particular fs, not sure if that will work for drives other than cdrom's though.

[dylunio]

You could try it without the t option, with

mount /dev/hdb /mnt/hdb

, but I doubt this will work,

You could check the integrety of the disk with

fsck --check /dev/hdb

as root (I think is syntax is correct, if it doesn't work try

man fsck