[CentOS] how do determine last file system on disk?

Sun Jun 26 08:26:37 UTC 2011
Keith Roberts <keith at karsites.net>

On Sun, 26 Jun 2011, Rudi Ahlers wrote:

> To: CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org>
> From: Rudi Ahlers <Rudi at SoftDux.com>
> Subject: Re: [CentOS] how do determine last file system on disk?
> 
> On Sun, Jun 26, 2011 at 10:04 AM, John R Pierce <pierce at hogranch.com> wrote:
>
>> On 06/26/11 12:58 AM, Rudi Ahlers wrote:
>>>
>>> All the drives are old 160GB SATA. There's 1x 160GB IDE as well.
>>>
>>> They were used in the office on various machines, so no hardware RAID,
>>> but they definitely had some data on them.
>>> I did get some drives with software RAID on and could recover the
>>> data, but there's 2 drives which I can't figure out what filesystem
>>> they have / had on them.
>>> We use Linux & FreeBSD, so I suspect they had ZFS / UFS on them, but
>>> couldn't mount them on a FreeBSD server with ZFS or UFS either.
>>>
>>
>> is it possible you used the raw disk without partitioning?   so in
>> linux, that would be /dev/sdb instead of /dev/sdb1 or whatever.
>>
>>
>> on a random server with normally partitioned disks...
>>
>> # file -s /dev/sda
>> /dev/sda: x86 boot sector; partition 1: ID=0x83, active, starthead 1,
>> startsector 63, 256977 sectors; partition 2: ID=0xfd, starthead 0,
>> startsector 257040, 4192965 sectors; partition 3: ID=0xfd, starthead 0,
>> startsector 4450005, 138914055 sectors, code offset 0x48
>>
>> # file -s /dev/sda1
>> /dev/sda1: Linux rev 1.0 ext3 filesystem data (needs journal recovery)
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> john r pierce                            N 37, W 122
>> santa cruz ca                         mid-left coast
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> CentOS mailing list
>> CentOS at centos.org
>> http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
>>
>
> It's hard to say. They've been in the cupboard for along time and I don't
> know which tech did what on them, which is why I'm trying to see which file
> systems were on them last, so that I can see what data is on them.

What about using a spare low spec machine with removable 
EIDE and SATA drive caddies? This would come in handy for 
times like these, or if you needed to wipe a drive 
completely befroe disposal?

HTH

Keith Roberts

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