Florin Andrei wrote:
John Summerfield wrote:
There's a field called "type" You don't want it set to "mountable filesystem" - commonly called hpfs/ntfs.
Use fdisk to list the partitions and see. Also, I think XP plays games with the space, reserves some outside partitions.
It would be nice if mke2fs could look at the partition type (if it's a true disk partition, and not a file mounted -o loop or something like that) and give a warning if the partition type is not 83 (Ext2/3).
mke2fs is not a partitioning tool, it's for creating filesystems. Doesn't need to be on a device:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/ext-fs seek=$((4*1024*1024)) count=0 mke2fs -F -q /tmp/ext-fs
and it doesn't need to be partitioned. one could mke2fs /dev/sda
I guess that would complicate the application logic quite a bit, but I lost count how many times I reformatted a partition and forgot to kick the partition type with fdisk. :-/