At Sat, 25 Jun 2011 13:46:01 +0200 CentOS mailing list <centos@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
>
> Hi all,
>
> Does anyone know how to determine which file system a disk was formatted
> with, if fdisk -l doesn't show it?
>
>
>
> usb-storage: device found at 5
> usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
> Vendor: Model: Rev:
> Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02
> sd 7:0:0:0: Attached scsi disk sda
> sd 7:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0
> usb-storage: device scan complete
> usb 1-4: USB disconnect, address 5
> usb 1-4: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 6
> usb 1-4: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
> scsi8 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
> usb-storage: device found at 6
> usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
> Vendor: Model: Rev:
> Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02
> sd 8:0:0:0: Attached scsi disk sda
> sd 8:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0
> usb-storage: device scan complete
> [root@HP-DL360 ~]# fdisk -l /dev/sda
> [root@HP-DL360 ~]#
>
>
>
>
> I need to see what data is on a bunch of disks that I found in storage and
> would prefer to first check if there's anything of use on them before I
> format them
If 'fdisk -l /dev/sda' does not show anything, either the disks were
never partitioned or formatted, at least not as a bare drive. What kind
of disk is this (I know it says USB above, but I am assuming these are
bare disk(s) that you installed in a USB enclosure).
It is *possible* these disks were part of a *hardware* RAID array, in
which case only the hardware RAID would know how to deal with them
(they would have some vendor-specific metadata / superblock on them
somewhere). If the disks are not partitularly large (< 1TB) if they
were actually in use they would likely have a MS-DOS partition table
(which fdisk -l would be displaying). If they are larger disks they
might have gpt partition table (parted would show this). It is
possible that they have a Solaris disk label (if they were in a Solaris
machine).
It is *possible* that someone used them as part of a Linux software
RAID array using the whole disk, in which case there might be a MD
superblock on them (mdadm might see it) and it is ALSO possible that
they were part of a LVM volume group, also using the whole disk as a
PV, in which case there should be LVM metadata on them (lvm might see
this).
If none of the above, they are just 'factory fresh', never used disks.
--
Robert Heller -- 978-544-6933 / heller@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Deepwoods Software -- http://www.deepsoft.com/
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